Strange AA (anti-aliasing) woes..

[James Richard Tyrer]

hugo wrote:
>    Hi list,
> 
> I'm having some issues with KDE-3.2 (which I compiled myself), regarding 
> the rendering of Anti-Aliased Fonts. I have a feeling I am overlooking 
> something *really* simple, or something plain weird is happening. Either 
> way, it's something that I cannot explain.
> 
> -- Problem description
> I downloaded Konstruct, made sure my libraries were up-to-date, and 
> started the build-process. This all went OK. After it was installed, I 
> ran it, and wanted to enable Anti-Aliasing.
> 
> After I have enabled it, and start up, say Konsole, from the panel, it 
> comes up, without any anti-aliasing. So I thought I needed to restart X, 
> which I did.
> 
> When the KDE comes up, it displays the Splash Screen, in which the 
> progress-text (like Initializing peripherals, etc) *does* appear 
> anti-aliased, but when kdesktop and kicker load, they just show the 
> crappy un-anti-aliased font.

<SNIP stuff that we might need to get back to later>

First about Konsole.  The text in Konsole should NOT be AntiAlised if you 
are using the standard Konsole fonts -- i.e you selected them by: Small, 
Medium, Large, etc..  However, this font should be an unscaled bitmap font 
and should look good.

Second all of the other stuff.  The font system for KDE is handled by Qt 
and Qt depends on Xft[2], FontConfig, and FreeType2.

So, the first guess is that when you compiled Qt that it didn't find one or 
more of these three dependent libraries.

There are specific issues with these libraries.

If they are not installed with a prefix of: "/usr" or "/usr/X11R6" then Qt 
will not find them (unless this has been fixed in the newer versions) 
unless you tell it where to look.

If you have more than one version of Xft or FreeType2 (you can also have 
FreeType[1] installed -- no problem) then you might also have problems. 
They might have come with XFree86 and you might have also installed them 
separately.

It is also possible that if you installed Xft[2] from RPMs that it doesn't 
have the same name as if it was built from source.  Don't you just hate it 
when that happens. :-)  In that case, a link might do the trick if that 
doesn't create a name conflict.

My configure command for Qt-3.2.x is:

./configure -system-zlib -qt-gif -system-libpng -system-libjpeg \
-system-libmng -thread -no-xinerama -no-g++-exceptions -qt-sql-mysql \
-I/usr/local/include/mysql -L/usr/local/lib/mysql

I have no problem with the above font stuff, but note how I had to add the 
locations for the includes and the libraries for: "mysql".  This is what 
you need to do if you have the font stuff somewhere else.

--
JRT
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