[ILUG] Re: fonts in netscape

[Padraig Finnerty]

On Thu, Apr 06, 2000 at 04:00:27PM +0100 Paul Jakma wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, Padraig Finnerty wrote:
> 
> > hi, I was wondering could anyone recommend any good truetype fonts for
> > netscape.  I installed the xfstt server yesterday 
> 
> RH6+ xfs already supports TrueType.
> 

Yeah, I tried that, but as ever when I try to install a RH6.x rpm on my 
(originally RH5.1) machine, I get caught in a strange loop of dependencies,
as happened this time, which is why I got the xfstt tgz, but xfstt is
working fine.

> pass -dpi 100 to your Xserver.

Ok, I tried that.  It didn't make any difference, 100dpi was the default,
I think.

> read the X font deuglification mini-howto.

yeah, I already had.

> make sure you have 100dpi/hires fonts listed before 75dpi/lower res
> fonts in your fontpath (or in fs/config), ditto for :unscaled.

I had that done, but they only affect non-truetype fonts if I understand
things correctly.

Back to my original question of what fonts to use.  It seems the non-serif'ed
fonts are quite readable at <font size=1> but are not as readable at regular
sizes.  And vice-versa for the serif'ed fonts.

I would like to tell netscape to use a non-serif'ed font at <font size=1>
and use the default font otherwise.  I was looking at the Xresources that
can be set for netscape, and a couple are of interest.  One is:

Netscape*documentFonts.sizeIncrement: 5

This tells netscape to increment/decrement fonts (when size is specified)
by 5%.  <font size=3> is the default 12pt (or whatever), <font size=2> is 
then 5% smaller, <font size=4> is 5% larger, and so on.  The default for 
this is 20, so changing it to 5 has made things much more readable.

Another Xresource that you can set are font attributes, based on the font 
size specified in the document, i.e.:

Netscape*documentFonts.variable*1.foundry: schumacher
Netscape*documentFonts.variable*1.family: clean
Netscape*documentFonts.variable*1.weight: medium
Netscape*documentFonts.variable*1.slant: r
Netscape*documentFonts.variable*1.pointSize: 120

will all affect all document fonts of <font size=1>.  This would seem ideal, 
but it doesn't work.  It seems that the preferences.js file is over-riding 
my .Xdefaults.  I was wondering is there anyway to get netscape to ignore
the preferences.js file and just use .Xdefaults? (where things are much
more configurable)

Failing that I could always set up a proxy server on my own machine and get
it to preprocess the web pages, replacing <font size=1> with 
<font face="fixed"> or something.

Overkill maybe, but I was planning on setting up the proxy server anyway 
so I could have better control over caching, and to filter ads and things.

It seems to me that netscape is really a Windows program, ported to Linux, 
and it will *always* be that, which is why it drives me up the walls.

Padraig