I changed from Gnome to KDE. I had been pleased with my fonts in all programs in Gnome, but everything looked pretty ragged in KDE. The answer to the puzzle probably is at the end of all that I did, but the trip was fun.

I found Control Center/Appearance Themes/Fonts. I didn't seem to have much in the way of choice for fonts. I turned anti-aliasing on. This didn't help.

It occurred to me that maybe I needed TrueType fonts. That didn't make a lot of sense, since fonts had looked good in Gnome, but I mounted my Windows partition and copied the .ttf fonts to /usr/X11R6/lib/fonts/TTF. That didn't give me any new fonts. I tried mkfondir running it in the TTF dir. I backed up the current one first and ended up with a new one that had nothing in it. I replaced the backup.

I decided to try putting the font path for TTF at the front of the list in the X config file in /etc/X11 - mine is called xorg.conf. I had first logged off from X and did this as root. I thought that might be a good time to check how X looked as root in KDE. I started X and the fonts looked great. I looked at the settings and had lots of fonts to choose from. I noted that anti-aliasing was turned on. Then I left X and went back to user and brought up X. Same ugly fonts. And when I tried to look at the fonts in the Font viewer (found in the Utilities) I still could only see a few. Hmmm. Why in root and not as user–permissions, I bet.

I looked at the font directory and sure enough only the original fonts were 644. The ones I had transferred there from Windows were 600. chmod took care of that and I could then see the new fonts in the Font viewer as user.

Still the fonts were ugly. I recalled that root had anti-aliasing turned on. I turned it on. Still ugly. I had seen a Configure button next to the anti-aliasing; so I looked at that. It had a check by Exclude Range which was set for 8-15pt. I unchecked it and now I have lovely fonts.

My guess is that if I had just turned on anti-aliasing and unchecked that Exclude Range to start with, I would have had decent fonts again. Still, with all this, I now have a large choice of fonts; so that's nice.

Created by Anita