Linux FAQ's & Manuals

next up previous contents
next: unicode fonts up: fonts for x11 previous: fontconfig and xft   contents


x11 core fonts

nowadays the x11 core font system not only supports bitmap fonts (see section 5.2 but also scalable fonts. and with xfree86 > = 4.x the core font system can handle not only type1 fonts but also truetype fonts, opentype fonts (see section 5.3), and cid-keyed fonts (see section 5.4).

unicode fonts are also supported for a long time already.

but originally the x11 core fonts system was designed in 1987 for x11r1 to handle only monochrome bitmap fonts and it still shows that all those extensions were added later as an afterthought.

for example scalable fonts are supported only without anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rendering and loading huge, scalable cjk fonts can be very slow and using unicode fonts can also be quite slow and wastes a lot more memory than necessary.

there are many other inherent problems in the design of the x11 core font system, and it can probably be said that it is broken beyond repair. it must be kept for backwards compatibility, but if possible one should switch to using the more modern system xft/fontconfig as much as possible (see section 5.1.1).

except when using truetype/opentype fonts which are extremely well hinted and the byte code interpreter in freetype2 is enabled, scalable fonts rendered (in monochrome) by the x11 core font system are usually rather ugly and can be almost unreadable at small sizes. especially for complicated cjk glyphs.

as perfectly hinted fonts are very rare, especially for cjk, it is usually better for readability to use bitmap fonts at small sizes.

if you use the x11 core font system a lot and have enough disc space, i recommend installing all the bitmap font packages available for the cjk languages you are interested in.


subsections
next up previous contents
next: unicode fonts up: fonts for x11 previous: fontconfig and xft   contents
2005-03-09