Why do packages install yucky fonts? (Shallow Thoughts)

Why do packages install yucky fonts?

This evening, thanks to Rob Weir's Debian Font Guide and some suggestions from Rob himself, I finally got rid of that ugly oversized scaled-bitmap helvetica (or similar) font that has plagued all my Debian installs since I first started using Debian. It turns out that it comes from the gsfonts-x11 (ghostscript and gv). Remove gsfonts-x11, and gtk windows now use a much much smaller, clean, truetype helvetica font. Alternately, keeping gsfonts-x11 installed, but removing /usr/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 from the font path, gives me a medium sized, cleanly rendered helvetica in gtk windows. I may have trouble viewing postscript documents in gv; we'll see. But having all my other windows use clean fonts makes it worth risking some gv breakage.

Other things I had to do: install x-ttcidfont-conf (defoma was already installed); disable the font server (comment out the unix/:7100 line from XF86Config-4, plus update-rc.d -f xfs remove); reorder the FontPath lines in XF86Config-4 as suggested in the font guide, and remove (comment out) the /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/CID line.

Strangely, even if I list the Type1 directory after all the others in XF86Config-4, it still takes precedence over all the other helveticas. Neither Rob nor I could figure out why.

Why do packages include fonts like that? Abiword used to have a font like that on Redhat. It's almost always for helvetica (which has a gazillion other implementations anyway, so it's not as though they have to worry that they won't be able to find a helvetica on the system if they don't install theirs).

Tags: linux, fonts
[ 19:00 Jul 09, 2004    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]