Qt fonts HOWTO
This is a short HOWTO describing what is needed to get a good font support
with Qt applications on X11. It is mainly interesting for distributors or people setting
up Unix font support on their own. It is by no means complete, and you'll
have to work out some of the details I just sketch by yourself.
Enjoy,
Lars
(updated by Ivan E. Moore II rkrusty@debian.org with Debian specific information).
Contents
- Getting Antialiased fonts on XFree86 with Qt & KDE
- Getting a nice looking desktop without antialiased fonts
- Bitmapped fonts on X11
- Add existing scalable fonts to your fontpath
- Using true type fonts
- Using true type and postscript fonts for printing in KDE
- Where to find nice looking true type fonts on the web
- Getting good fonts for other scripts than latin
- Resources on the web
1. Getting Antialiased fonts on XFree86 with Qt & KDE
You will need to follow a few steps to get antialiased fotns on your X11 desktop. Please note,
that parts of the X11 code for the rendering extension are still experimental and drivers
do not exist for all graphics hardware.
There are a few preconditions you'll have to meet: (most are auto with Debian)
- You will need freetype2 installed on your system. (libfreetype6)
- You will need XFree86 >= 4.0.2, current CVS is recommended.
- The XFree driver for your graphics card will have to support the
rendering extension. Information as to which hardware is supported is
unfortunately a bit incomplete. Matrox is (and as the only one currently
hardware accelerated). As far as I heard the NVidia drivers are still under
development, but should come out soon.
- For other drivers have a look at the XFree86 web site.
Once you have all this, you can see if the rendering extension is available, by looking
at the output of xdpyinfo and checking if RENDER is listed as an extension.
If yes, you'll need to get a Qt-2.3.0 or later compled with Xft support. If you compile Qt yourself,
add -xft to the configure line.
You will need some nice looking true type fonts to really enjoy the Xft extension to
X11. See Chapter 4 in this HOWTO on where to get some. The Microsoft webfonts
are of very high quality and a good start.
After having downloaded them, you will need to add the path to your
true type fonts to the XftConfig file in /etc/X11.
Now set the environment variable QT_XFT to true
and start any Qt appliction (for example the designer). You should hopefully get
nice antialised fonts.
In case you are running KDE and don't get any fonts on your desktop, try removing the ~/.kde/share/config/kdefonts file.
2. Getting a nice looking desktop without antialiased fonts
2.1. Bitmapped fonts on X11
The standard X11 distribution comes with a set of bitmapped fonts. Unfortunately,
the standard setup allows the XServer to scale these fonts. As scaled
bitmap fonts look really ugly, the first thing to do is to tell the XServer not to
scale these fonts. This can be done, by editing the XF86Config file.
Replace all font path entries pointing to directories containing bitmapped fonts
as for example:
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi"
by
FontPath "/usr/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi:unscaled"
Like this you'll never again see ugly scaled bitmapped fonts on your screen.
2.2. Add existing scalable fonts to your fontpath
There are a lot of free scalable fonts out there, that can be downloaded
and used. Some of them are distributed with X11 and some with ghostscript.
The sclable fonts distributed with X11 are automatically included in your
fontpath, so there is no need to worry about them. But you might want to add
the postscript fonts coming with ghostscript to your list of scalable
fonts.
The