Install Fonts

[ace2005]

I want to install some TrueType fonts, how can i do this?

And the main question is how will it affect performance, i'm adding 130 fonts, 7.2MB in total, just asking because once i went overkill on fonts in windows and installed 5000 fonts and it was very slow, most noticibly Photoshop, so will gimp be affected?.

[ace2005]

Oh by the way there are great fonts at http://www.goodfonts.org/, thats where the fonts are from :)

[balcinus]

Hi,
I've just did that: there are several ways apparently. For the easiest one, read the following link (it's real short):
http://www.fedorafaq.org/#windowsfonts

WARNING:
instead of
fonts: (!!DIDN'T WORK, SEE BELOW!)
in the KDE File Manager address bar, you should enter

fonts:/ (Note the slash)

This is a small typo in the FAQ.

Nusret

[balcinus]

Thank you for the links, it looks great :)
Nusret

[fpoole]

You can also just go to Control Panel from the K Menu, then expand System Administration.

[balcinus]

fpoole is right, you can install fonts in many different ways, I believe.
But, simply installing fonts won't do any good, especially if you're a fontophile.
I would also suggest you to visit:
http://www.fedorasolved.com/viewtopic.php?t=55

If you're patient enough to read all that (basically two web pages), you'll be glad you did, as you're desktop will get close to a windows desktop in font rendering quality (not in all cases, but mostly: still there will be small problems buried here and there).

Nusret

[smfinley]

Here is an RPM (http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc4.shtml#ttf) for True Type fonts.

[ace2005]

Thanks, i'm only now selecting the fonts i need and i remove the ones i do not need (i still installed all 130 fonts though) I just wanted to know the affect of lots of fonts in linux. Does lots of fonts like 5000 in linux slow it down more or less than windows.

[balcinus]

Well, can't tell that for sure, but (in my case) Windows XP seems to have a little better performance overall, when it comes to graphical responsiveness. If that rule holds true with fonts as well, sure your sytem will get some performance hit. Linux renders truetype fonts via a library called freetype, which is in turn used by Xft, via fontconfig, as far as I know from my search on the net for a day or two now.
Obviously, that's a lot of outsourcing of the job, and this usually means performance hit. Anyways, just try and see for yourself (and let's know hw it goes :) ).

But again, if you notice, fonts are not rendered as cute as they are in windows. To remedy this, just visit the link I posted above (www.fedorasolved.com). I think this is more important than the performance problems.

Just my two cents :).

Nusret

[ace2005]

But again, if you notice, fonts are not rendered as cute as they are in windows. To remedy this, just visit the link I posted above (www.fedorasolved.com). I think this is more important than the performance problems.

Just my two cents :).

Nusret

No i never noticed, it looks just like windows

[balcinus]

OK then, I was not that lucky :). It really took me a while to correct the rendering.
Nusret

[Omega Blue]

The type rendering on Linux seems fine to me. The only really bad one is the default console type for Gentoo 2005.0. That looks horrible. Nothing can be done, either, it's not about hinting or anything like that.

[balcinus]

Omega Blue,
Please don't take it wrong: I don't mean to criticize anyone. I was just so frustrated by the font rendering on Linux in the past evry time I dared to try any distribution.
Fedora Core 4 was no exception out of the box :(.
Only recently I learned the Freetype thing. I also understand rendering may be better on LCD screens, but I have, and always had CRT monitors.

For example, did you ever try to change your default desktop and browser fonts to windows fonts on a newly installed redhat/fedora (I can't say anything for other distros)? And did you still find the rendering fine (I mean compared to Windows XP)? And did you do this on a CRT monitor?
If you can say yes to all of these, I could only say: this is a matter of taste then, we have simply incompatible choices. I believe, the default rendering is fairly poor compared to Windows XP.

I only recently noticed that you can change things by a modified build of freetype library: it really gets close to Windows. However, you still need some customizations for small bold fonts. Just a couple of hours ago I learned a very flexible customization scheme is available via fontconfig, but I couldn't test it yet. I think, when I can manage to handle it, my fedora desktop will be on par with my Windows desktop :).

As to the console font, the normal one is not so bad in KDE Konsole, but the other choices are not good in Fedora in my opinion. Mandrake console fonts beats all others hands down in my opinion. But that's not a big deal, I'm not a big fan of console anyway :).

Best,

Nusret