[Fontconfig] Font configuration - Debian Sarge.

[cga]

Ambrose Li wrote:

>I share the same feelings.  It took me *days* 
>
you must've cheated.. like working full-time.. round-the clock.. or 
something..

It's already taken me *weeks* and I'm far from done.. :-)

>to figure out
>how to configure fontconfig when I was forced to switch over.
>Before I figured out that things could be tweaked (and how to
>tweak them), I was actually complaining that fonts had become
>much uglier than before.
>
That was my exact first reaction.. Rather than constantly rebooting I 
run my Debian desktop(s) chrooted on another vt.. so I was able to make 
instant comparisons either by switching vt's or via screenshots.. When I 
first took a look at the X that Debian installed I thought.. Hmm.. looks 
like there's some tweaking needs to be done.. But I *never* imagined 
that it would take me close to a month to achieve results that are yet 
not quite as neat as what I see in my old environment. And mind you, 
apart from switching my default variable font from helvetica to verdana 
in a few places I never really bothered tweaking that environment at 
all. Provided I used small fonts and stayed away from the 
printing-oriented stuff like dvi or gv everything looked just about as 
clean and legible as in Windows.

>Of course, now I'm ok with fontconfig... :-)
>
Since it was one of the major changes with recent XFree86 versions .. my 
first reaction was t think that fontconfig was to blame. Then I re-read 
the fontconfig documentation more carefully and I realized that my 
problem had nothing to do with fontconfig per se.. As an end-user trying 
to customize my desktop I had no business directly dealing with 
fontconfig.. Instead I should consider using dpkg-reconfigure or the 
KDE/gnome configuration tools to set my aliasing/hinting preferences.

>But on a Debian system there is the extra variable of defoma
>too: good for prepackaged fonts, but a real hassle for self-
>installed fonts.
>
Since I'm switching to Debian (trying to switch to Debian would be 
somewhat more accurate at this point..) .. where this little fellow 
comes into the picture is yet another mystery... Seems de-fo-ma does for 
Debian system administrators what fontconfig does for application 
developers.. provide a centralized control point for everything font-wise.

Thanks much for your comments.. The other gentleman's remarks gave me 
the impression that everything was working perfectly for everybody so 
it's nice to know that someone else saw what I had seen.. and thereafter 
spent a sizeable amount of time fixing the problem.