One Laptop Per Child
By now you’ll all have heard: The OLPC is available for sale on a “buy one, donate one” basis, for $400 USD, which worked out to about $430 CAD for me including the shipping.
By now you’ll all have heard: The OLPC is available for sale on a “buy one, donate one” basis, for $400 USD, which worked out to about $430 CAD for me including the shipping.
A week ago, a reader named Erik contacted me regarding font rendering on Linux with a question (for which I sadly did not have the answer), and some highly interesting news for Linux Firefox users. In short, by supplying a little environment variable when you start up Firefox (also works with Thunderbird), you can instruct Firefox to render fonts using Fontconfig instead of Pango.
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Since I wrote my original article on the subject of font rendering in Linux, a few things have happened: Freetype development has moved forward, and I’ve experimented quite a bit, always trying to improve on how fonts appear on screen. I’ve achieved significantly better results using the latest Freetype and Cairo LCD patches than was previously possible, and have finally spent a morning putting my experience in writing to help others with similar interests.
One of my longest-running annoyances with font rendering under Linux has been that of the Georgia font; it is a modern favourite for rendering serif text as its bolder weight and well-designed hinting. Unfortunately, Georgia has never rendered as well for me under Linux as it did in Windows; I finally put 2 and 2 together and realised why this is the case, and came up with a simple solution to fix my complaint.
Or, How a recent Windows user became depressed/frustrated within weeks of switching to Linux.
Would-be Linux converts, beware: Despite all the Digg articles you’ve read about how strong gaming on Linux has become, you’d be wise to do your own investigation. I’ve been doing mine for days now, after having had a craving to escape into another world for a few minutes to unwind—and so far, my search has come up nearly bone-dry. Let me explain.
So I haven’t written anything since New Years.
That isn’t entirely accurate—I’ve tried to write the same story twice, but given up both times after a couple paragraphs. It suffices to say that despite having spent a very painful week trying a variety of combinations, I still can’t get fonts to render the same on two different Linux distos. They look pretty good on Gentoo now, though, after a lot of hassle—Long story short, patch Freetype 2.2.1 and Cairo 1.2.4 with the ‘FIR Filter’ patchfiles, then recompile with the -bindist USE flag for Freetype, then use the essence of my previous post for configuring your ~/.fonts.conf to disable autohinting between pixelsizes 10-12 for everything, then make font-specific changes for Arial, Verdana, and the like to render crisply at common resolutions.
Important Note: This article is deprecated; in a more recent article I have briefly explained how to achieve better results than those below. Since this is a blog, I’ve left the original article intact for historical reasons.
As a designer and as someone who spends a lot of their time in front of a screen, I’m especially sensitive to how fonts render in the software I use. One of the greatest challenges I’ve had with Linux is getting text to render simultaneously attractively and readably. The good news is, after a lot of tinkering, I think I’ve got it more or less down pat. What follows are some basic instructions as to what I did, although I suggest reading and altering to suit your needs as opposed to outright copying so as to ensure the results you seek.First, a brief definition of what I sought: Antialiased fonts are relatively easy to achieve on Linux in recent times thanks to considerable effort by its advocates. The trick for me was to strike a balance between the smooth, sleek look of Mac OSX’s “antialias the hell out of everything” approach and Microsoft’s cleartype, which produces (in my opinion) clearer and more legible text at frequently-used font sizes (at my screen’s resolution, anyway) but less appealing font shapes at higher resolutions, and fonts get obliterated at lower resolutions.If you’re interested in improving font rendering in Linux and seeing some examples, read on.
A recent blog entry by Mark Shuttleworth (owner of Canonical, creators of Ubuntu Linux) describes a gripe about audience response to his presentations about Linux: “pervasive support.” I think Mark and I agree that this level of product support is required, but our opinions perhaps differ a bit on perceived vs. actual levels of “support” in/for Linux, or even the multiple meanings of the word.
He first points out that commercial distribution vendors are willing to offer end-user support for their products—for a fee of course. He however neglects to point out there are multiple levels of end-user support, including the “non-critical” variety that is acceptable—even preferable, in some cases—to home users and DIY types (who prefer to learn to fish rather than be handed one when they get hungry)—as well as those working on a budget who don’t have the extra cash to shell out for support (or the operating system itself).
Anyone watching the news has no doubt long-since encountered the news of Novell entering a “protective covenant” with Microsoft to essentially line Novell’s pockets in exchange for “protection” against patent infringement suits from Microsoft, because according to them, Linux infringes on many of their patents, and Ballmer has made a lot of noise (read: FUD) about how Microsoft is going to start to pursue legal action to protect them. It smacks more of posturing tactics to me; kind of like how they got caught red-handed lining SCO’s pockets through investment intermediary BayStar Capital, except this time they’re operating overtly instead of covertly.
I confess I was surprised when I read that Microsoft had a change of heart on the subject of allowing Windows Vista to be reinstalled. Apparently someone at Microsoft got the message from the online community that their previous position—which was to allow the software to be reinstalled once only, ever—was pretty stupid, and that its discovery and wide publication was doing them more harm than good for a product that is already receiving a hefty share of criticism from the community on other issues.