Fonts in KDE/X, any expert here ?

Hi,

Does anyone know how I can tell KDE to use an alternative font search sequence for a specific encoding ?

What I have is a situation like this, the default setting now works beautifully for me, but only in western encoding. If visit a Chinese web page which doesn't specify a specific font but only the encoding, the default bitmap font(comes with XFree86) is used which even though is correct(thanks to the XFree86 team for that), looks extremely ugly because of the size issue. I have at the same time installed some TTF that looks much better but KDE(or may be X) some how don't want to use it as it feels satisfied with the situation(you give me an encoding and I find that in the default font, so I stop). I would like to tell it that "if you see chinese encoding, start your search list from TTF first", is that possible ?

Try KDE Control Center, Appearance and Themes, Fonts. I find that simply choosing different fonts here can drastically improve things (in KDE at least). I have no experience with Chinese fonts, but I have been able to get some Greek and Hebrew fonts to look pretty good....all I did was install them with the KDE control center by going to System Administration, Font Installer. Trying out some different fonts in the Mozilla preferences and in Konquorer preferences has also drastically improved things. Good luck.

thanks. the problem I have is that for western(latin) fonts, the default is very good for me(even without Microsoft's TTF) but oriental(Chinese especially) is very different. So a 10pt in latin may be good, but it is too small for Chinese. If I change the font to be Chinese 'friendly', all the western characters looks bad as the Chinese font is not designed with them in mind.

Create a .fonts directory in Home and populate it with the MS fonts you need. That will make them available to Mozilla. Here are the asian fonts I use:

Japanese:
Variable Width Font: - MS Gothic
Fixed Width Font: - MS Gothic

Traditional Chinese:
Variable Width Font - MingLiu
Fixed Width Font:- MingLiu

Simplified Chinese:
Variable Width Font - MS Hei
Fixed Width Font: - MS Hei

Korean:
Variable Width Font - GulimChe
Fixed Width Font: - GulimChe

Thanks, but I am trying to work in KDE(Konqueror) rather than Mozilla. I have no problem to make Mozilla use the truetype fonts installed. The problem with Konqueror is that it would by default use the X-fonts(rather than the TTF) and since the X-fonts already have the Chinese code page, it refuse to search further down. I believe there must be some font matching algorithm change in either X or KDE so instead of matching based on family, also an alternative way of matching on codepage(sort of different sorting sequence).

Beside, I try to make a system without MS fonts(copyright issue, as there is legal problem of distributing them in a CD).

Ah, I see your point. You are in for a bit of a challenge. You might want to try this forum
http://www.kde-forum.org/
or possibly download the Big5 ISO, if that is the version of Chinese you are using:
ftp://debian.linux.org.tw/pub/3Anoppix/

The Chinese font rendering seem to be quite a bit better in this version.