On Jun 14, 2001 at 23:05, ashok iyer wrote:

Rajen, I have used a separate font server called xfstt.

much about fonts. But xsftt is excellent. I borrowed some true type fonts from a Windows 98 machine. I do not know if it is the right way.

Works for me.

On 14 Jun 2001, ashok iyer wrote:

Rajen, I have used a separate font server called xfstt. It is available via freshmeat. I am very satisfied with its performance

xfstt is not required since xfs already has the freetype libraries built in. I use xfstt with xfs at home, and xfs in the office. Both work well, except that xfstt takes about 3-4 seconds to start (which is too much I feel). Actually, my xfs at home supports ttf's, so I don't need xfstt.

You actually don't even need xfs, as the X server can handle the fonts on its own, but using it is a good way to separate out the roles. Besides, since xfs will do the font scaling, the X server won't hang while scaling fonts (a big problem in the past).

compared to xfstt. I am unaware of what is meant by anti-aliased fonts etc. In fact I do not know much about fonts. But xsftt is

If you look at the edges of screen fonts, (or most things on screen actually), you'll find that at any sloping edge, the edge is not smooth, but jagged. This is so because the pixels on the slanted edge are square, so you'd get a pattern similar to this:

_ as opposed to this: |_ \ |_ \ |_ \ | \

In order to give the appearance of smooth edges, what we do, is generally throw in a few gray pixels of increasing intensity at the edges, to make it seem (from a reasonable distance) that the black pixels are really slanted. It's kinda hard to explain using ascii art, but what you can do is in the gimp, put some black text onto a white background. Then zoom in to the edges and you'll see what I mean.

The same thing happens with slanted lines.

You can try doing the same thing without anti-aliasing and see how it looks.

excellent. I borrowed some true type fonts from a Windows 98 machine. I do not know if it is the right way.

If you have a licence to use the fonts, then there's no problem. There are many free fonts available at microsoft's site as well as other sites on the net. Some fonts are licenced for your use when you buy certain software, so if you own that software, you can use the fonts.

Philip