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It's cool you figured out so much about this virus.  You know enough to
write the antivirus for it.

On Fri, Oct 18, 2002 at 10:17:23AM -0700, Phil Mattison wrote:
> There are still a few things that prevent me from switching exclusively to
> Linux. One is that the on-screen font rendering is not as good. Maybe the=
re
> are licensing issues that prevent this, but in my opinion the page render=
ing
> in Nestcape or Mozilla, for example, is ugly, and most other apps are not

Yes by default, but I bet with some tinkering you could get it really
pretty.

I see that Mozilla can be compiled with the FreeType library, so it
would have built-in TrueType support, I guess.  Of course that's not
ideal; it should be a system service, not something that has to be=20
compiled into every app.  But at least you could presumably get=20
pretty fonts in Mozilla now.

Font support is complicated; there are X bitmap fonts, X scalable fonts
(Type 1) in multiple formats and with separate font metrics files,
TrueType fonts, Ghostscript fonts (used for printing and for viewing PDFs
in gv), fonts in ROM in your printer, and TeX fonts (about which I heard
that they use quadratic curves rather than the usual cubics).  (Did I
miss any?)  It's impossible to make all of them available for both screen
and printing purposes in all apps.  I suppose if GhostScript gets around
to TrueType support, maybe some day we could just use TrueType and
uninstall all the other types, so it's simpler to maintain; trouble is,
snooty designer/printing people insist that Type 1 fonts are
better-quality.

Debian has this ambitious project called defoma that's supposed to
automate font management; but I haven't really figured it out.  If I
print from KWord I get different fonts than are on the screen; in X, some
fonts that used to work have disappeared; etc.  Some word processors
(like AbiWord) embed the fonts in the outgoing Postscript, so that it's
irrelevant which fonts are available to the Ghostscript installed on my
print server.  But then, AbiWord has its own fontpath too, so it can find
all the fonts.  How redundant.

> much easier to read. Another is the constant firehose of "updates." Most
> people want to use their OS, not tinker with it. These days an OS is more
> like an appliance than a hobby. Until the open-source community gets that
> through their heads, Linux will never be a serious contender for the
> consumer desktop.

Let's hope we don't; not having updates is the same thing as not having
innovation.  For every update that you consider just part of the gush,
there's a few people who were waiting on the edges of their seats for it.=
=20
But some distros shield you from them more than others.  I'd suggest you
try running the stable version of Debian. You won't usually see any
improvements for a year or two, only security fixes.  Of course you will
not have the latest stuff then, but that's by definition.  (avoiding
updates =3D=3D being out-of-date) And when the next stable version comes ou=
t,
usually apt-get dist-upgrade takes care of it without any manual
tinkering afterwards (although you do have to babysit the upgrade and
answer questions, at least it's a scripted well-known process by then,
without unknowns).

--=20
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
 (_  | |_)                       http://ecloud.org  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
 __) | | \________________________________________________________________

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