Hi, having installed the newest Mozilla ebuild, 1.2.1-r5, which I compiled with gtk1 support, I noticed that the font rendering seems to be significantly better than previous releases. Xft support works very well, and the dialog in Mozilla now allows for the selection of all available TrueType fonts which is great. Font rendering is now significantly better than even Konqueror and well on a par with the browsing experience on certain commercial platforms. After emerging galeon-1.2.7-r1 I was suprised that the quality of the rendering did not match mozilla, particularly on pages which do not specify detailed font choices. For example, the Gentoo Forums looked the same in both, but www.gnome.org (to pick one example) would not. Intrigued, I examined the situation more closely. What I have found so far is that by copying some of the font configuration directives from the prefs.js in my mozilla profile to my galeon one that the font rendering then became identical between them, and I was able to use Galeon happily :-) The only thing is that going into the preferences dialog box then causes a segfaul in galeon. I gather this might be something to do with galeon throwing a fit because the prefs.js file doesn't match an expected schema (maybe because galeon was built with an older version of mozilla in mind?). I am trying to investigate further. My idea is that it would be great if galeon could somehow be persuaded (maybe with a patch) that mozilla's method of setting preferences is acceptable, and that it would be marvelleous to get this in the 1.4 release. I have attached my prefs.js for galeon before and after grafting in some of the directives from my mozilla prefs.js. I've also added my full mozilla prefs.js for comparison. No extensive customisations have been made in the UI of either program. One obvious difference is that mozilla uses this: user_pref("font.minimum-size.x-western", 11); whereas galeon uses this: user_pref("font.min-size.fixed.x-western", 11); user_pref("font.min-size.variable.x-western", 11); It seems likely that those directives (in principle) serve the same purpose, but that mozilla changed the syntax at some point. I guess an about:config in mozilla will reveal more. A diff will show up the rest of what I added from mozilla. As I said, I haven't investigate too deeply yet but I'll see if I can find anything else out. I have also found that the following settings give the best results in Mozilla: * Set default Proportional font to Sans-Serif (not Serif) * Set Serif font to "Times New Roman" * Set Sans-Serif font to "Arial", although some may like "Verdana" * Set the rest to "Courier New" * Set the size of the Proportional font and Monospace to something like "12" * Set the default Minimum font size to "11" or "12", that's very important. Similarly for galeon of course. This all looks really great too if you have something like this in your ~/.fonts.conf: <match target="font"> <test qual="any" name="size" compare="more"> <double>8</double> </test> <test qual="any" name="size" compare="less"> <double>15</double> </test> <edit name="antialias" mode="assign"> <bool>false</bool> </edit> </match> It is also a good idea with fonts.conf to alias Mono and fixed to Courier New, sans-serif to Arial or Verdana and so on - it _significantly_ improves the appearance of fonts in X (all environments and Window Managers) in general - but I'm still working out how to do that - I had it working at one point. I used the old XftConfig and the main fontconfig file for ideas. Another advantage is that, in the case of Gnome2, because it uses "sans-serif" for interface fonts, you can get a good look with these directives, without a user going and fiddling with the fonts control panel. Another point, Gnome2 sets a bad DPI value by default in its font configuration panel (50 I think). 72 is much more reasonable and the default used by X. I actually measured the DPI on my monitor and it was a shade under 73 and it seems to me that most (at least 17" 1024x768) monitors are indeed more or less 72dpi. I'll try and attach some screenshots soon to show you the significant effect this has. I'm using Gnome2 by the way, no masked or experimental builds with a recent install from a 1.4_rc2 CD. I used stage 3 and GRP for X, then emerged and upgraded everything from there.
Created attachment 7706 [details] My mozilla and galeon preferences Tarball contains: prefs.js.galeon-old, prefs.js.galeon-new and prefs.js.mozilla.
Created attachment 7707 [details] Tarball containing 5 1024x768 PNG screenshots Contains: browser-showcase-1.png: Mozilla and Galeon with showing www.gnome.org with equivalent font redering (grafted prefs.js and .fonts.conf), plus file-roller to show how Gnome is benefited too. browser-showcase-2.png: www.microsoft.com in Galeon (new config and .fonts.conf) browser-showcase-3.png: www.gentoo.org in Galeon (new config and .fonts.conf) browser-showcase-4.png: www.gnome.org in Galeon with fresh unmodified prefs.js (not so good) browser-showcase-5.png: Same as 5, but simply changed to my preferred fonts and sizes in font configuration dialog box as mentioned above when talking about mozilla (/really/ not very good) In the case of 4 and 5, Mozilla looks fine by comparison. It seems that sites that specify truetype fonts in their style sheets/directives are immune to the bad font rendering scenario, but others are not (such as www.gnome.org, www.mozilla.org and many, many more). By using the Mozilla prefs and other techniques discussed, _everything_ looks really good. And large fonts are anti-aliased properly as they should be, so they look smooth.
interesting read this certainly is something worth to consider, but might take some time to look into. Defaulting X to use microsoft core fonts (verdana, etc.), im not sure thats a good idea and ofcourse galeon preferences crashing is no option either. And if we're going to do something like this, we should ofcourse also consider KDE and maybe the *box-es.
I presume you mean that defaulting to Microsoft fonts is a bad idea because of potential legal issues. I'm not so sure. Perhaps these Bitstream fonts that have been recently "donated" may prove useful at some point? http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/03/01/22/1932238.shtml?tid= One thing's for sure. With fontconfig and Xft2, Linux has never had it so good. But it doesn't mean much without qood quality fonts, and Type1 rendering still appears to be significantly lacking. The standard XftConfig for the Gentoo XFree builds would prefer MS TrueType fonts (back when XFree wasn't fontconfig enabled), as evidenced still in /etc/X11/XftConfig. Many other cool configuration options that people contributed to the Gentoo XftConfig have still not been translated into fontconfig syntax and preserved. I don't see any harm whatsoever in patching the default fonts.conf to behave in the same way. As far as the issue of improved defaults is concerned, I believe it's just a matter of swapping the first tow lines that are already present in several <alias> sections. (e.g. raising Courier New above Courier in the alias list for monospace and so on). If it was OK then, then what has changed now? If you choose not to use MS fonts then it won't change anything, Type1 versions (or alternatives) will get used, just as before. The XFree ebuild installs all the MS TrueType fonts whether you want them or not anyway, so why not use them? Admittedly, this is probably OT for this bug though - but I hope you can see my point. So many programs in X look junk without this simple preference order change. I will file the XFree patch suggestion as another bug, and see what happens :-) I acknowledge that when making changes which specifically affect window managers and GUI applications, that it would be preferable to make changes "across the board". I think also that I'll have a nose around the Galeon mailing list to see if the main issue raised by this bug has been discussed in any way. Thanks for the response.
we are too short on manpower to really look into this right now. But i think currently most of these issues already have been addressed with new fontpacks and related fontconfig setup.
