Re: Fuzzy fonts under 2.2.2?

[Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>]

Hi,

Geoff <capsthorne yahoo co uk> writes:

> I just upgraded from gtk+-2.0.9 to 2.2.2.  I don't run
> gnome, but I think I have all necessary libraries.  I am
> running Xfree 4.3 and the icewm WM.
>
> I am no expert on fonts.  I work mostly in arial, and I
> immediately noticed that the font seems to look less sharp
> than it did before I upgraded.  The difference was
> immediately obvious in the newsreader Pan, where I had
> previously been using arial 12, which now looked bigger and
> much fuzzier than before.  It helps to reduce the size to 11
> (which previously would have been too small and is now quite
> legible), but the poorer quality (to my eye), of the
> rendering remains.
>
> Is there a reason for this?  Am I doing something wrong?

GTK+-2.2 by default uses Xft2 to render antialiased fonts while
GTK+-2.0 defaulted to the old-fashioned X11 core fonts. If you really
don't like the new font rendering, you can set the environment
variable GDK_USE_XFT to 0. But you should be aware that the old
server-side font rendering will not stay forever, it is likely not to
be supported with future releases of Pango.

You can improve the text rendering by using an uptodate version of
freetype2. Also, enabling the truetype bytecode interpreter in
freetype2 improves the legibility of small fonts.


Sven