opera + antialiased fonts

12 Sep 2002

I finally got antialiased fonts working on Opera this week. My fonts got screwed up somehow (I am still unclear on what happened, really), so I decided to get it working once and for all.

Things I did to get it working, in a not so particular order:

• TrueType Fonts (best for antialiasing):
• • Mounted “C:\Windows\fonts” on my WinXP PC from my laptop on /home/cwage/fonts
  • cd /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType
  • cp /home/cwage/fonts/*.ttf .
  • ttmkfdir -o fonts.scale
  • mkfontdir
  • (If you don’t already have /usr/lib/X11/fonts/TrueType/ in your FontPath in your XF86Config, add it now. I already had it)
• Opera:
• • In order for antialiased fonts to work with Opera, you must have the version that is built dynamically against QT. So, the first thing I did was: apt-get remove opera-static; I then downloaded the non-static package and installed it. You’ll need libqt2 if you don’t already have it.
  • Created a wrapper script to spawn opera in ~/bin/opera:

    #!/bin/sh
    
    

export QT_XFT=true

/usr/bin/opera </pre>

• Voila! The results: (Warning: big images)
• • Before.
  • After.

Okay, so the JPG sampling sorta makes it hard to tell. But, trust me, it looks nice. Oh so nice. Now if only I could get it working for all my GTK apps.