Here are some pages that describe how fonts work, and how to set up nice fonts on your system.

Note - The freetype library (for displaying truetype fonts) has recently started using fontconfig for configuration rather than XftConfig, which is now obsolete...

BitstreamVera is a free TrueType font specifically developed for FreeSoftware by GNOME and Bitstream (a company that makes fonts). They look much nicer than the default Luxi fonts (especially sans-serif) that Red Hat use, so you can replace them with a simple substitution, either system wide in /etc/fonts/local.conf or ~/.fonts.conf for your user alone. (Google, find this page on "how to change the default KDE font" please!)

        <alias>
                <family>sans-serif</family>
                <prefer>
                        <family>Bitstream Vera Sans</family>
                        <family>Luxi Sans</family>
                        <family>Albany AMT</family>
                        <family>Verdana</family>
                        <family>Nimbus Sans L</family>
                        <family>Arial</family>
                        <family>Helvetica</family>
                </prefer>
        </alias>

Change the ordering to suit!

Disable hinting

Put the following into your /.fonts.conf to enable or disable automatic hinting. If you set it to false, fonts look very crisp. Set it to true and the fonts look smoother.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

Thanks to GNOME Hacks.

• Using AntiAliasedFonts in graphical applications. (Laptop users might be interested in SubPixelAntiAliasing.)
• See UnicodeNotes for hints about font support for unicode applications.

And some how-tos:

• OpenOfficeFonts? to install new fonts under OpenOffice
• HowToFontHOWTO? gives lots of background and overview about the different kinds of fonts (Type1, Truetype), faces (serif, sans-serif), and basically everything you ever wanted to know.
• HowToTTXFree86? describes setting up your X server to use true type fonts, such as those used by MicrosoftWindows.
• HowToTTDebian? describes true type fonts for debian users, including viewing on screen via applications such as X, groff(1) and tex, as well as printing via ghostscript.
• The XFree86 Font De-uglification HOWTO (HowToFDU? or http://feenix.burgiss.net/ldp/fdu/) is probably the most up-to-date/relevant infomation for setting up fonts under recent (XFree86 4) distributions.

Miscellaneous Technical Notes:

• In the fonts.dir file, you can point different encodings (charsets) to the same physical file, BUT ONLY FOR SCALABLE FONTS. I spent quite a while trying to determine why my characters were wrong when I tried to do this for a bitmap font (eg a 75dpi one). It is the scalable font backends that do the magic here, not X itself.

CategoryXFree86Notes