opera + antialiased fonts

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>

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.