I might be a bit slow, but I finally figured out how to get a decent font (i.e. not anti-aliased) for gnome-terminal on Debian.

1. Ensure xfonts-100dpi is installed
2. dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig and answer yes to the question about bitmapped fonts.
3. You will now have under Desktop->Preferences->Fonts the ability to select the Fixed font.
4. Restart all gnome-terminals. The font may look a little weird before you do that.
5. Enjoy tabs without the fuzziness!

Update: it appears I'm not the only one who doesn't like the fuzzy fonts in my terminal.

Davyd Madeley suggested that rather than enabling bitmapped fonts you can just enable a single font with fontconfig. He gives this example (place it in /etc/fonts/conf.d).

He suggested

There was an issue of it choosing extra wide fonts sometimes. You can fix this by copying the version of Fixed you want (eg. 7x13.pcf.gz) into your ~/.fonts directory.

James Ballantine suggested copying the font as well, although for some reason his Firefox started to choose bitmapped fonts after following the above steps.

I can't really understand why, as it appears that bitmapped fonts are enabled by default on Debian; at least in my fontconfig package we have in the post-install script

case "$enable_bitmaps" in
"true")
#
# Bitmap fonts will be enabled by default, so there's no need
# to use this configuration file.  However, the file remains useful if
# you want to force bitmaps to be considered even when some application
# disables them.
#
#       ln -s $CONFDIR/$yes_bitmaps $CONFDIR/$bitmaps_prio$yes_bitmaps
        ;;
*)
        ln -s $CONFDIR/$no_bitmaps $CONFDIR/$bitmaps_prio$no_bitmaps
        ;;
esac

So the dpkg question is at least badly worded, but I haven't yet decided if this is a bug. Probably the only thing I did was install the xfonts-100dpi package which gave me the bitmapped fonts.

Any other feedback is appreciated.

posted at: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 13:07 | in /linux/tips | permalink | add comment (2 others)