[Fontconfig] Font configuration - Debian Sarge.

John Thacker thacker at math.cornell.edu
Thu Feb 17 14:05:52 EST 2005


On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 08:44:24PM -0500, cga wrote:
> 
> What's so hard to understand? If "tweaking was impossible" .. then no 
> tweaking tool was necessary.. alright?
> 
> Before the anti-aliasing craze the only things that were "tweakable" 
> were the font "family" and simple variations such as pointsize.. style.. 
> You didn't need to be a screen font expert to understand these concepts 
> and figure out how to achieve the results you wanted. Granted, you had 
> to track down the different files where fonts were referenced and modify 
> them one at a time but conceptually the changes were absolutely trivial.

Except that you were pretty much screwed in the old way if you needed to
deal with multiple different languages with different scripts simultaneously.

I easily got a *much* better looking desktop without doing anything, simply
because I don't have to constantly change my font configuration to in 
order to work with all the different languages I use, and to avoid, e.g.,
having to use the crappy Latin characters from the font that has the
best Japanese characters.  I also don't have to run special applications
and terminals which are worse in most respects and have fewer features,
but are the only ones which really do internationalization properly.

Some of the complaints about Vera Sans and the work done with changing
Debian and others to Verdana and other fonts are mostly complaints about
the lack of truly free high quality fonts, too.

John Thacker
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