Fonts in Precise Puppy are thin and hard to read

[Keisha]

I'm using Precise 5.7.1, not the Retro version...I have been wondering what Firefox does if the expected font does not exist? There are far fewer fonts installed in my Puppy compared to Xubuntu.

Maybe there is some way to tell Firefox to act differently?

If the font the webpage expects does not exist, the font renderer (not sure what file that is) selects the closest thing to it it can find on your system.

In Firefox, Edit->Preferences-->Content-->Fonts & Colors-->Advanced lets you specifiy default font choices and sizes, and you can check "Allow pages to choose their own fonts." Some webpages are capable of serving fonts on-the-fly, usually Google fonts.

I've just downloaded Precise 5.7.1 and its devx and will have a go at installing infinality-ultimate. Might be a week though, as we had a storm last night and I have some yard cleanup to do.

I agree with mikeb, the wiry-looking fonts in your initial post look like they are getting anti-alias'ed twice.

What is the url of the webpage you call the main Puppy page? Is it Precise's own welcome page?

[Robin2]

What is the url of the webpage you call the main Puppy page? Is it Precise's own welcome page?

This page

I think I have got things to the stage where I feel Puppy is usable long term but the fonts are much more relaxing in Xubuntu without ever having needed to tweak anything.

And I do like the sense of community in this Forum.

...R

[Keisha]

Here's what it looks like with infinality-ultimate fonting (screencap taken in upup-3.9.9.1). In real life it looks better than this, the process of screen capture and cropping makes it slightly fuzzier than what I see on screen.

Gonna be a week or two though before I have time to attempt to install it in Precise.

[Keisha]

And here it is in Quirky Unicorn 6.21 with IU fonting. I haven't tuned it yet, as I have upup:

[mikeb]

Bog standard Dejavu fonts... as they can look
Again not fine tuned for lcd/image
mike

[mikeb]

no comment?

[rokytnji]

no comment?

Gonna be a week or two though before I have time to attempt to install it in Precise

Might be busy mikep (as I put on my morning tea water to boil)

[mikeb]

ah ok.... seemed the hot topic went quiet... your reading ability is better than mine .... got some sleep at last so that helps.

They are posting elsewhere though...

mike

[Robin2]

no comment?

I'm not sure if this is aimed at me as the OP?

I have still not seen anything that produces the nice comfortable-to-read text like my Xubuntu. Nor an explanation about why the exact same website should appear different on Xubuntu and on Puppy.

I am quietly watching developments here.

...R

[mikeb]

Well anyone really...just demostrating that its not the fonts but how they are handled otherwise you end up chasing the holy grail of adding numerous fonts rather than getting to grips with the causes.

Actually I should do a Lucid 'before and after' screenshot.... quite a dramatic change on there especially on some web pages...my webmail had unreadably tiny and thin fonts for messages for example.

Myself and other posters have given some clues...the whole picture is a bit messy as you can probably appreciate.

Workarounds are valid too... if setting default fonts in the browser works then do it... the minimum sizes generally dont play well, the defaults are times/serif based which puppy often lacks in true type.

mike

[Keisha]

no comment?

Gonna be a week or two though before I have time to attempt to install it in Precise

Might be busy mikep (as I put on my morning tea water to boil)

Hang on, I have a life outside Puppy.

@mikeb: The lowercase "w" has jaggies and the text has yellow haloes. But I've seen a lot worse.

I just installed Precise-5.7.1 and wasted two hours on its remaster utility, which *does not* properly carry over my openbox setup and my wbar drive icons. I guess I'll just do a bog-simple remaster, including the devx and some extra fonts.

Then install the wbar-0.0.3 pet and vicmz's openbox-plus 1.62 pet. Then compile infinality-ultimate.

Then manually separate-out the i-u stuff in the savefile from the wbar and openbox stuff, and create the .pet.

It isn't trivial to compile i-u from scratch. The build goes, approximately:

which
libpng
freetype
libffi
pcre
libxml2
gLib
shared-mime-info
desktop-file-utils
icu
glib again
harfbuzz
freetype again
libidn
fontconfig
libjpeg
libtiff
ijs
cups
lcms2
cairo
pango
gdk-pixbuf
gtk+
poppler
cairo again

...so it'll be a few days or a week yet.

[mikeb]

Hang on, I have a life outside Puppy.

highly recommended.... though the discussion did stop abruptly...no worries.

all examples don't have smooth 'w' and halo wise thats more likely a separate issue...I used gimp for screenie...

font configs, antialias and hinting with perhaps a dpi tweak are the tools needed... the odd browser setting finishes the job.

If adding fonts then perhaps dejavu serif and monospace would complete the picture... myself I like all in sans as seems easiest on the eyeballs for long term use. With puppy the switch to unicode mean fonts got larger so became less complete to compensate.

mike

[mikeb]

Ok reshot on lucid using mtpaint...note the firefox menus too.

The second shot is from http://www.vorck.com/windows/
its a great one for testing...do your fonts match up?

mike

[totolanio]

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=97418

[mikeb]

No zooming used for these screenshots...thats not exactly a good workaround as you have to do it for each site/page. Plus if bitmap fonts are being used its no help either.

Depends if you want to deal with the symptoms or the causes.

mike

[Keisha]

Got it. Now to whittle the .SFS down from its current 14 MB I had to upgrade half of X and all of Mesa in order to get Cairo and Freetype with the Infinality patches to run. Not sure how much of the resultant additions are absolutely necessary...

[Keisha]

komonews.com letting the website choose its own fonts, just so you get an idea...

[Keisha]

One more --now off to bed. Back tomorrow.

[Keisha]

Here's the .pet (1788 K):

http://www.datafilehost.com/d/2584233a

# sha1sum infinality-ultimate-fonting-precise-5.7.1.pet
5775bc7c66f5f4de498dbf87cc4e35b207c31a2a infinality-ultimate-fonting-precise-5.7.1.pet

Reboot after installation. Read the readme.txt in /etc/fonts for a thumbnail overview. If fonts look too thin, raise the "USE_STYLE=" number in /etc/profile.d/infinality-settings.sh and reboot.

and some fonts to go with it (55 MB)
http://www.datafilehost.com/d/5f84ff68

# sha1sum Extra_fonts_for_Infinality-0.0.1.pet
878c36ae492ddb1b6074f82896b7e3d22ff7d4ab Extra_fonts_for_Infinality-0.0.1.pet

Restart X to make them "take".

My apologies if a nice Russian lady solicits you for romance or something on this site. Can someone tell me an ad-free upload site?

[Robin2]

Perhaps I might bring the discussion back to my original question. Most of the responses here have been about work-arounds rather than the core problem.

Since writing that I have tried TahrPup and, if anything, out-of-the-box the print is even worse than with Precise.

As someone said in an earlier post, Tahr includes a Font adjustment program and ticking Antialias makes a huge improvement.

But it is still not as comfortable to view as my Xubuntu on which I am typing this (on the same Netbook).

There must be some reason why thins are different under Puppy, compared with Xubuntu?

What is that reason?

...R