Antialiased Gnome Terminal Font

jbrown · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 17 Feb 2003 Posts: 81

Gnome Terminal 2.2.1 introduced antialised terminal font rendering. I have always believed that one day an antialised font for terminal / programming work would be superior to the best bitmap font. In my opinion the best bitmap font for terminal / programming is fixed(misc) size 12.

[img:1e4f26261d]http://emergence.uk.net/shot1.png[/img:1e4f26261d] [img:1e4f26261d]http://emergence.uk.net/shot2.png[/img:1e4f26261d]
[img:1e4f26261d]http://emergence.uk.net/shot3.png[/img:1e4f26261d]

The best antialised font for i can find on my system for this is Andale Mono size 10.

[img:1e4f26261d]http://emergence.uk.net/shot4.png[/img:1e4f26261d] [img:1e4f26261d]http://emergence.uk.net/shot5.png[/img:1e4f26261d] [img:1e4f26261d]http://emergence.uk.net/shot6.png[/img:1e4f26261d]

This font is not really good enough for a working enviroment. However, Bitstream have donated some fonts to the free software community:

Look here, here, here, here and here.

At the bottom of the image in the last link there is Vera Sans Mono 8. It looks like the perfect antialised terminal font.

Does anybody know when/where these fonts are available :?:

idl · Posted: Mon Feb 17, 2003 2:46 pm Post subject:

Try Verdana it looks lovely on my screen.

jbrown · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 17 Feb 2003 Posts: 81

Its a bit better perhaps, but all the letters run into one another.

David_Escott · l33t Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 952 Location: Boston, MA

I use the monospace font with bold and it looks fine. I think bold may be the key to making these look good in a terminal. The other thing to check is that the dpi is set correctly since if this is off all the pixel placement work done by xft will be for moot (although this doesn't look to be a problem with yours).

[smeagol] · Apprentice Joined: 24 Oct 2002 Posts: 152

I use andale mono, it wasn't as "blocky" as monospace. On my computer, the monospace font would always be thicker on one side :roll:

_________________
In God We Trust, All Others We monitor.

David_Escott · l33t Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 952 Location: Boston, MA

smeagol if fonts look weird like that ie blockier on one side or with other strange artifacts it is suggestive that you dont have the xft configured properly. If you are using an lcd perhaps the subpixel rendering is incorrect, but more than likely your dpi is wrong. Changing that can yield remarkable results.

jbrown · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 17 Feb 2003 Posts: 81

Well the bitstream vera fonts have finally been released in beta form.

To install them simply make the directory ~/.fonts and copy all the *.ttf files into it and gnome apps should find them.

Check out my new screenshots:

[img:ec2510219b]http://emergence.uk.net/shot7.png[/img:ec2510219b] [img:ec2510219b]http://emergence.uk.net/shot8.png[/img:ec2510219b]
[img:ec2510219b]http://emergence.uk.net/shot9.png[/img:ec2510219b]

Its a definite improvement. The only annoying thing is that the * symbol is in the air which is annoying for terminal / programming in C.

zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

Looks nice...

Terminals must used fixed or monospace font, otherwise some spacing will look bizzare.

I haven't managed to get gnome-terminal-2.2 to work... Yet. They always segfault somewhere in the libgobjects glib library