Member Avatar for floris

Hi there,

I have been running SuSE 9 Professional since it came in retail in the store on my wife's desktop system and we love it. As desktop distribution it works great. Everything is easy to install and works perfectly.

Unfortunatly we keep running into this problem with the font.

All the default installed programs through YaST are showing nicely anti aliassed fonts, but when I download Mozilla 1.6 and install it, it shows in a crappy blocky font, this also happens for many other programs that have to be compiled and aren't pre-build for SuSE. (I.e. FireBird worked! but thunderbird didnt!)

I hope someone has this too and knows how to fix this. Because it is really annoying.


I have too little experience with the GUI end of unix, so would be great to get some 'noob' help :)

Floris.

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This pattern (YaST-installed apps look smooth, source-built ones look blocky) strongly points to an Xft/fontconfig/freetype mismatch: the system has smoothing enabled for the distro packages, but the custom-built apps either weren’t linked against Xft/fontconfig or the TrueType font stack isn’t available to them. ’s Ximian suggestion is a practical, quick route (it bundles nicer fonts), but a longer‑term fix is to get the Xft/fontconfig/freetype stack working for all apps and to compile with the development libraries present so binaries link to those libraries.

Steps that commonly resolve it — diagnose first, then fix:

  • Check that fontconfig, freetype and Xft are installed and that the browser binary actually links to libXft.
  • Make sure fontconfig knows about installed TrueType fonts and rebuild the cache.
  • Enable Xft antialiasing/hinting in X resources and reload them.
  • If compiling, install the *-devel packages (fontconfig/freetype/libXft) before building so the app links to Xft rather than falling back to core X fonts.

Representative diagnostics and commands (adjust paths/binary names as needed):

rpm -qa | egrep -i 'fontconfig|freetype|libXft'
ldd /path/to/browser-binary | grep -i xft
fc-cache -fv
fc-list : family

# add to ~/.Xresources (then run `xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources`)
Xft.antialias: 1
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.rgba: rgb

If ldd shows no libXft, install the appropriate development packages and recompile or use the distro-built package. Installing a small set of TrueType fonts and running fc-cache -fv often fixes many display problems. As noted, this is fundamentally an Xft/fontconfig issue rather than a Mozilla-only bug; fixing the system font stack brings compiled apps into line with YaST-installed ones.

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Member Avatar for Dani

This is not an answer at all but I just thought I'd mention it anyways. I used to run RedHat and just about everything - including Mozilla - was a yucky blocky font. What fixed it for me was installing Ximian Desktop which actually boasts special smooth fonts.

Member Avatar for floris

Each answer is 1 :)

I will read up on that, have a link to that product/company?

Member Avatar for TallCool1

All the default installed programs through YaST are showing nicely anti aliassed fonts, but when I download Mozilla 1.6 and install it, it shows in a crappy blocky font, this also happens for many other programs that have to be compiled and aren't pre-build for SuSE. (I.e. FireBird worked! but thunderbird didnt!)

You might check out Knoppix.net (see below). Sure, it's Debian, not SUSE (they just changed to all-upper-case, by the way), but this is a KDE issue that has been dealt with. Do a search on "fonts" combined with "crappy", "blocky", "problem", etc.

Member Avatar for Dani

http://www.ximian.com for Ximian Desktop

Ximian Desktop 2 also includes a Mozilla-based web browser, popular browser plug-ins, professional fonts, built-in Red Carpet software management, and much more.

It can be purchased or a lite version (including the fonts but without the Red Carpet software which keeps all packages on your system up to date in 1-click) can be downloaded for free.

Member Avatar for movielad

One hopes that now Novell (who own Xiamian and SuSE) will sort this out properly for the next release (SuSE 10?).

Regards,

Martyn

Member Avatar for TallCool1

All the default installed programs through YaST are showing nicely anti aliassed fonts, but when I download Mozilla 1.6 and install it, it shows in a crappy blocky font, this also happens for many other programs that have to be compiled and aren't pre-build for SuSE. (I.e. FireBird worked! but thunderbird didnt!)

Here's yet another aspect. This article was just published to the Linux Journal site:

My Knoppix install of Mozilla does call the Xft libraries, so I'm pleased.

Member Avatar for WEATHER CHANNEL

I've been using SuSE since the days of old. I have not had such a prob.

Member Avatar for Dani

I had the yucky font problem in Mozilla with RedHat 8/9. Installing Ximian fixed it for me. No experience with any other distros other than Mac OS X with Fink.

Member Avatar for WEATHER CHANNEL

Perhaps you should slipp in.

Member Avatar for Dani

I don't understand?

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