Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Eyes-Only · Posted: Wed 13 Feb 2008, 16:50 Post subject:

There's a gentleman by the name of deniros who's done a basic package of this in "Additional Software", either as a .pup or .pet, and released it to us where he's turned on the bytecoding and stuff. Now of course the results will be in no way as good as what SHS has documented above because following his methods you'll get the exactitude for your size monitor whereas this package is solely a "rough guesstimate" of course.

However, I've found that for lazy people like me -rolls eyes- deniros's packages do make a fairly "good 'nuff" substitute for the time being until the day when I do have time from working on five separate distros to sit back and give some attention to going through with what SHS has very graciously taken a great deal of time to hand to us here freely of his own time and effort.

BTW: Deniros's packages may be found here: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=26020

Thank you so very much SHS for doing this and I have bookmarked this page for future reference. I hope others have as well. I've also taken one of the sections you'd written prior---equally as detailed---and copied it to a text file which is now backed up on a CD with other important documents. Way to go! You know how I feel about this as we've discussed this in the past to great extent.

Once again SHS, thank you for all your hard work in making Puppy more easily readable for those with vision problems.

Amicalement,

Eyes-Only
"L'Peau-Rouge"

disciple · Posted: Mon 03 Mar 2008, 19:44 Post subject:

I've done a whole lot more experimenting in the last couple of days, and here are some of my observations:

-The change to /usr/X11R6/bin/xwin stops X starting on my machine
-for some bizarre reason the code for antialiasing in local.conf didn't work, but if I first turn antialiasing off for all fonts, and kept the suggested code to turn it back on for large fonts (taking out the code relating to small fonts), then I got the intended results.
-I prefer to have antialiasing turned off for fonts up to 26 pixels rather than 13.
-changing the code in Xorg.conf I can't fix the stroke on the capital K in Times New Roman at size 28. But maybe this is because I don't have the change to /usr/X11R6/bin/xwin?

Eyes-Only · Posted: Mon 03 Mar 2008, 20:12 Post subject:

I'm just curious disciple: Are you using a Puppy version below 2.10? I ask because you supposedly only needed to make that directory if using a Pup below 2.10---2.10 and above used the X11R7 pathway if I've read SHS's instructions correctly.

Not that I really know all that much about this topic in all actuality. So like I should be speaking! Embarassed

Amicalement,

Eyes-Only
"L'Peau-Rouge"

disciple · Posted: Mon 03 Mar 2008, 20:36 Post subject:

Yes.
The really funny thing is that the sub-pixel rendering settings don't do anything on my (LCD) screen. I'm wondering if it is a problem with fontconfig not reading local.conf correctly, but there seems to be no way of finding out.

erikson · Joined: 27 Feb 2008 Posts: 735 Location: Ghent, Belgium

Now *here* is a thread that I have to read very carefully !!!

Having had various ancestors and close relatives in the printing business, coming from the Windows world and being used to Verdana, Tahoma, Arial, Times New Roman etc, and having taken pains to make my personal website typographically appealing... I was missing that in Puppy.

Now let's see if my computer skills are on par to get these fonts working.

Wolf Pup · Joined: 27 Apr 2006 Posts: 637

liberation fonts - metric-compatible with Monotype Corporation's Arial, Times New Roman, and Courier New.link

Liberation Sans - Arial
Liberation Serif - Times New Roman
Liberation Mono - Courier New

liberation_fonts_ttf-0.2

md5sum

erikson · Joined: 27 Feb 2008 Posts: 735 Location: Ghent, Belgium

On my pcPuppyOS pendrive (under /usr/share/fonts/default/TTF/), I simply have put symbolic links to the Verdana and Tahoma fonts on my WinXP hard disk (under c:/WINDOWS/Fonts/, mounted as /mnt/hda1/WINDOWS/Fonts/).

Lo and behold! IceWM and Thunderbird see and use these fonts, even with correct point sizes.

Next, OxygenOffice swriter (as included in pcPuppyOS) has a lot of built-in fonts, but (to my taste) few if any are suitable for documents with a "professional" look.

Now I created a sample document with MS Word under WinXP, using various popular "windows" fonts (arial, verdana, tahoma, times new roman, courier new, trebuchet). When I open this doc in OxygenOffice swriter (included in pcPuppyOS), lo and behold! the fonts show correctly, and I can even edit text using these fonts.

Ninety percent of my Puppy font concerns are solved Wink

erikson · Joined: 27 Feb 2008 Posts: 735 Location: Ghent, Belgium

I'm trying to follow SHS's instructions, including the compilation. It will be my first Linux compilation, wish me luck!

Concerning bash, he says...

Colonel Panic · Joined: 16 Sep 2006 Posts: 1443

Good thread, I intend to give the ideas in the OP in particular a try soon.

Colonel Panic · Joined: 16 Sep 2006 Posts: 1443

It worked! The desktop looks way better now. Many thanks to Sit Heel Speak for his post.

Next stop; adding the same fonts to Abiword. I expect there's a thread for that somewhere.

astrogreek · Joined: 21 May 2008 Posts: 29

I had a look at the screenshots by the OP (the "before" and "after"), and my reaction was:"You have got to be kidding! All that and so little improvement?"

Sorry to say it, but text looks far better on my Windows XP than they do in your screenshots.

Sit Heel Speak · Joined: 30 Mar 2006 Posts: 2595 Location: downwind

It helps to appreciate the beauty of these, if you are looking at a notebook LCD or a TFT flatpanel screen, and viewing at fullscreen in your image viewer (mtPaint or IrfanView).

Puppy 2.17.1 with one rxvt window chrooted into Gentoo.png

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view423.html

The actual page, so you can switch tabs and directly compare:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view423.html

Still think it looks better in XP?

@erikson: Bash 3.1 is now available as a dotpet, use Puppy Package Manager.

tadatada · Joined: 15 Jul 2008 Posts: 6 Location: Yuxi, YunNan, China

admiring you.

Sit Heel Speak · Joined: 30 Mar 2006 Posts: 2595 Location: downwind

An experiment:

Chinese fonts without my font tweaks (in "stock" Puppy 4.1-alpha-4, with the kai-pc.ttf font added-in and the short local.conf version given above, with "autohint" instead of "hinting" (in other words, using the standard Puppy capabilities):
http://i33.tinypic.com/1j6lj6.jpg

Chinese fonts with my full font tweaks (in Puppy 4.00-k2.6.25):
http://i35.tinypic.com/29w1tvm.png

I do not read Chinese, so cannot judge; would a native Chinese-speaker (reader) please look at both of these, and tell me if one or the other looks better?

astrogreek · Joined: 21 May 2008 Posts: 29