(I apologise in advance for a geeky rant)
deep breath
Okay, just what the fuck is XFree86’s problem with fonts? No matter what I do, no matter how many conflicting FAQs HOWTOs and BBSs I read, no matter how many piece of shit packages I edit and compile, it still looks like a sack of shit dipped in shit sauce and served with a side of shit.
I’m using Mandrake 9.0 (and XFree86 4.2.0), which is alleged to support anti-aliasing out of the box. Does it fuck. Apparently for some obscure licensing reason, freetype can claim to do anti-aliasing, but won’t actually do it unless you recompile the motherfucker from scratch, changing a #undef to a #define in a header file. Fine, so I do that, it installs, everything’s hunky-fucking-dory. I restart X, expecting fireworks.
Fuck all.
Then I remember that I’ve forgotten to install the truetype fonts, which, true to the free software ethos of Linux, I must nick from Windows. I go into drakfont, which I’m assured by numerous FAQ’s is dead clever. Like fuck. It falls over a few times, which is my fault because I assumed it would be capable of telling a .fon from a .ttf, but of course it’s too clever for that. I excise all the .fons from my font directory, and try again. Semi-success; the fonts install, or so they claim. There’s a whole bunch of error messages about unknown “foundries” but I assume this is not particularly important.
So I restart X, and check out some applications. Still a bag of shit, you say? Still a bag of shit. Oh yes. Not only had it imported all the true type fonts, but it had duplicated them according to a whole bunch of different foundries, each attempt looking shit in a subtly different way. Anti-aliasing now works, but Truetype fonts alias down to a ridiculously small size, with no clue as to how one might alter this. Scaling is fucking horrific, with characters’ sizes bearing little or no relation to their neighbours. Random letters seem almost bolded, and the appearance of the fonts is nothing like what the fonts should actually look like. The horizontal alignment is shocking. According to the FAQs, by this point I ought to be orgasming in appreciation of my mindbendingly beautiful fonts.
In short: as it stands, Linux is an unreadable pile of shit, and I with a Masters and the entire power of the internet behind me cannot make it work. This pisses me off.
Grrr.
[this post has been brought to you by Windows XP and the marvels of dual boot]
