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!
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.
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.
5 pages link to FontNotes: