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List:       redhat-list
Subject:    Re: netscape and fonts question
From:       Duane Clark <dclark () akamail ! com>
Date:       2001-07-31 17:55:07
[Download RAW message or body]

Here is my stab at some of the questions.

Peter wrote:

> I have systems with RH62/RH71 and Netscape Communicator 4.77.
> 


You might want to give Mozilla a try if you have not done so recently. 
The latest version is a dramatic improvement over previous ones. It 
still has it's quirks, but definitely usable. And the ability to block 
pop up windows makes it very worthwhile!


> 
> I have now read the Font-HOWTO and TT-XFree86 mini-HOWTO plus the XFree86 Font
> De-uglification HOWTO and I'm still a bit confused with netscape...
> 


Ha.. maybe that is because it is easily the most confusing part of X in 
my opinion?


> 
> In Netscape's Preferences --> Fonts, what does all these Fonts and Encodings
> options do? What is the difference with Variable and Fixed?


The easiest thing to do is run the application gfontsel, and click 
around to see what the things do. The font resulting from the selected 
fonts and parameters is conveniently displayed in the Preview box.

Fixed fonts have the same "width" for every character. The letter "i" 
takes up just as much space horizontally in a typed line as the letter 
"m". In gfontsel, select the courier font.

Variable fonts will have different spacings for the characters, so "m" 
is much wider than "i".

The main area where this is important is in viewing ascii art in the 
signatures of emails and news postings, since these will only look right 
if displayed in a fixed width font :-)

> Should I allow
> scaling or not? What _is_ scaling? Should I use my own fonts or not?
> 


If for a particular font, you only have fixed bitmap fonts, say 
helvetica 14 and 18 points, but an application requests a helvetica 16 
point font, xfs (the font server) can scale the font for you. But it 
will look ugly. The alternative is to not scale and just pick either 
helvetica 14 or 18. For TrueType fonts, scaling is not a problem.


> 
> And if I've created the font.alias files for my TrueType fonts as documented
> in http://home.c2i.net/dark/linux.html#ttf, should I use these lines in my
> .Xdefaults (as documented in Font-HOWTO):
> 
> --snip--
> Netscape*documentFonts.sizeIncrement: 20
> Netscape*documentFonts.xResolution*iso-8859-1: 100
> Netscape*documentFonts.yResolution*iso-8859-1: 100
> --snip--
> 


Try Netscape with and without them, and see if it makes a difference.


> 
> And what about the /etc/X11/fs/config file -- does it matter in what order the
> font dirs are listed?


Yes. If an application supplies wildcards in the font name it is 
requesting (and they almost always will), then xfs will supply the first 
font that it finds that matches.





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