Alternate fonts make Gnome easier on the eyes

-
I have poor eyesight. It's so poor that at times I prop my glasses up on my forehead and stick my face right into the monitor to read. This, of course, leads to great hilarity as my office mates come by and laugh at the blind geek. It's one of the real drivers behind my move to notebooks and LCD screens. With today's sub-pixel aliasing technology in Windows (ClearType) and Linux, reading text off of LCDs is a lot easier for me than reading text off of an older CRT.

Having sub-pixel aliasing and LCD screens isn't enough. You have to pick the right font as well. For Windows XP that isn't an issue. From the moment it's turned on the fonts on the desktop and in all the applications are correct and easy to read. The same is true, it appears, for Mac OS X. The same is not true for Suse 10 or 10.1 (the fonts selected by Ubuntu's live distribution (at least Dapper Drake) are, however).

I've discovered that the best fonts for this combination of notebook display and Suse 10.1 is Bitstream Vera Sans, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, and Bitstream Vera Serif. These fonts provide clear readable text on the LCD display in just about every point size from 11 on up. It makes working on the Linux graphical desktop easy, especially for long periods of time. And it adds beauty to the overall look of the graphical desktop.



The fonts as they are now. Note subpixel smoothing is enabled.



An example of Bitstream Vera Sans Mono in Gnome terminal.

Note
You have to go into Firefox and set the same fonts explicitly. Firefox doesn't get its font hints from Gnome (or KDE) the way it does from Windows.



The fonts dialog in Firefox. You get here via Edit | Preferences | Content.

Comments

Post a Comment

All comments are checked. Comment SPAM will be blocked and deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

A Decade Long Religious Con Job

-
Image
I rarely write inflammatory (what some might call trolling) titles to a post, but this building you see before you deserves it. I've been seeing this building next to I-4 just east of Altamonte/436 and Crane's Roost for nearly 12 years, and never knew who owned it. Today on a trip up to Lake Mary with my wife I saw it yet again. That's when I told her I wanted to stop by on the way back and poke around the property, and photograph any parts of it if I could. What I discovered was this still unfinished eighteen story (I counted) white elephant, overgrown with weeds and yet still under slow-motion construction. It looks impressive with its exterior glass curtain walls, but that impression is quickly lost when you see the unfinished lower stories and look inside to the unfinished interior spaces. A quick check via Google leads to an article written in 2010 by the Orlando Sentinel about the Majesty Tower. Based on what I read in the article it's owned by SuperChannel
Read more

Ten Reasons to Ignore Ten Reasons to Dump Windows and Use Linux

-
There is a tradition amongst the hard-core Linux aficionados to extol Linux's various virtues as a list of 10 or more reasons to substitute (as in "dump") an existing Windows installation with Linux. There's no reason to point them all out; a simple Google search (" 10 reasons to use Linux ") will provide you with such lists stretching back through the years, as well as hours of entertainment. One very recent list caught my eye over the weekend, published by PCWorld. Their article, " Ten Reasons to Dump Windows and Use Linux ", seems to have hit a nerve with me. Normally I just ignore such journalistic pap, since the majority of it comes courtesy of one ill-informed blog or another (such as this one). But in this instance a "real" publication put some time and journalistic "credibility" into this list, which places it in front of a wider audience than the typical blog poist (again, such as this one). So let's consider al
Read more

Former Eclipse user re-evaluates Eclipse 3.3M5

-
Image
I've been using NetBeans for a while now, starting with version 4.2 in beta. One of NetBeans' key selling points (in my not-so-humble-opinion) is Java GUI building with Matisse . That feature continues to be quite powerful and unrivaled, especially for a free-as-in-beer IDE. I even wrote a lovely paean to the wonders of NetBeans and why I moved away away from Eclipse to NetBeans . Now, it looks like I may have to eat some of those tastefully written words. What you're looking at above is a complete Ruby on Rails project hosted and running within Eclipse 3.3 Milestone 5 on Windows XP. Milestone 5 was released this past Friday, February 9th. I installed it Saturday, and then went on a plugin hunt to fill out additional features and capabilities. Why did I decide to re-install Eclipse, especially a milestone? So that I could get a complete integrated development and test capability in one convenient package for Ruby on Rails. Like a lot of other folks I've been playing
Read more