Fonts Issues

[Mike B.]

Hi All,

I've just installed Nedit on debian squeeze (testing). The Nedit version is 5.6~cvs20081118-7.

I have two issues with fonts:
1. Nedit does not show many of the fonts installed on my machine. How can I make Nedit aware of them?.

2. The legibility of fonts both in the menus and in the text editing region is quite poor compared to gedit. Is it possible to improve this?. Does Nedit support anti-aliased fonts?.

Thanks,
Mike.

[Dušan Peterc]

Hello Mike,

Post by Mike B.
1. Nedit does not show many of the fonts installed on my machine. How can I
make Nedit aware of them?.

If those fonts are antialiased, true type fonts, then you can't.
Otherwise you need to check font path of your Xorg file and add more fonts.
You can use command
xlsfonts
to check which fonts does your X server see.

Post by Mike B.
2. The legibility of fonts both in the menus and in the text editing region
is quite poor compared to gedit. Is it possible to improve this?. Does Nedit
support anti-aliased fonts?.

Nedit does not support antialiased fonts.
An newer version of Motif toolkit, OpenMotif, does support antialiased
fonts.
So if you use newer version of OpenMotif, for example, 2.3, you can have
antialiased fonts in the menu text.
This can be accomplised by simple resource setting, without even recompiling
it.
nedit -xrm "*renderTable: rt" -xrm "*rt*fontType: FONT_IS_XFT" -xrm
"*rt*fontName: Sans" -xrm "*rt*fontSize: 10"

But not in the main window, because nedit does not use Motif text widget (so
font traits are not inherited), but its own customized text display widget.
This would need to be substantially rewritten in order to support UTF8 and
XFT antialiased fonts.
Active developers did not show a lot of interest for this topic, when I
raised it a couple of years ago.
Some because of dislike of OpenMotif, some because they use older platforms,
where OpenMotif is not available, or has license issues.
Maybe this will change, as Linux and OSX will stay as the only remaining
platforms.

Best regards,

Dušan Peterc
http://www.arahne.si

[Aaron W. Hsu]

Hey there Mike,

Thanks for the message...

Post by Mike B.
1. Nedit does not show many of the fonts installed on my machine. How
can I make Nedit aware of them?.

Which fonts are you talking about in particular? NEdit uses the
traditional font model underlying X Windows, so sometimes if the font is
only available through things like freetype which don't communication
fully with the standard font system on X Windows (there are a lot of
different font libraries in X Windows, and thus, this can get confusing
sometimes), then it may not show up. On the other hand, NEdit filters out
certain fonts from display because they are proportional fonts, and you
can usually display those by checking the option in the Fonts dialog to
display proportional font.

Post by Mike B.
2. The legibility of fonts both in the menus and in the text editing
region is quite poor compared to gedit. Is it possible to improve this?.
Does Nedit support anti-aliased fonts?.

Use a better font. Also, keep in mind that NEdit does not make use of
anti-aliasing fonts at the moment, so you should focus on picking good
bitmapped fonts. Some fonts expect anti-aliasing and therefore do not look
very good without it. On the other hand, there are other fonts which look
pretty good even without anti-aliasing.

A lot of people would probably disagree with me here (and I'm a big fan of
serif fonts, so that is quite a bias here as well), but I do like the
default Luxi Mono fonts that come with X Windows. I think the do a pretty
good job, and the only reason I do not like them stems from their lack of
Unicode support. However, NEdit does not support Unicode right now, so
that's not a big problem when choosing a font for use in NEdit.

I also have my fonts at a fairly high resolution since I have a high
resolution monitor, so blowing up the fonts (or at least, picking the
larger fonts) is a major requirement for me. I think that the Luxi fonts
stand up pretty well, but you can tell that they are not anti-aliased.
This doesn't bother me since they are quite readable and look pretty good
even without anti-aliasing.

Aaron W. Hsu