Font usage?

Hey all!

I'm enjoying the heck out of the alpha, except for one thing...fonts. Buttons and such are readable (albeit with a funky background "overlay" that I suspect is another manifestation of the larger problem), but tooltips, chat boxes, etc. are completely unreadable blocks. (As soon as I figure out how to upload/display images, I can show an example *grin*). Any ideas? I run a pretty vanilla X server, fontwise...but I see that the installer has a fonts subdir, and I definitely see some good looking fonts in the other screenshots.

Any ideas appreciated. If I can get this working, I'll consider this thing usable already, and be most psyched!

Thanks for any help.

Not sure this could be your solution, but its worth a shot.

If you are on an LCD monitor, most of them do terrible unless you are running in your native resolution. SL looks awful, unless I A) Run in a window or B) Run in 1280x1024.

Aside from that, make sure you have the most current Video drivers (of course).

I've had no issues with fonts not looking crisp in the Alpha, but, I also run it in windowed mode, and leave my desktop at 1280x1024.

Hope this helps

Unfortunately, it appears to be some sort of display driver issue. I've realized that it's related to the text and background...the fonts look fine (really good, even) against black backgrounds like the present login screen (without the screenshot in back), or if I highlight text in a chat box.

But the unhighlighted text in the box right next to it (white background, black font) is completely unreadable. It doesn't appear that I can upload attachments, so I'll upload one to Flikr or something, and link to it here.

Hopefully it's something fixable, b/c as I said, I'm all over this if we can figure this out!

A listing of your hardware, as stated in the "sticky", would help a lot here, and which window manager (KDE; Gnome, fvwm, whatever) etc. In your case, also your monitor and its native resolution; e.g. I have a flatscreen, 1280x1024 native, which is what I run the screen at. By tweaking settings.ini, I run SL linux at 1152 x whatever.

Then anyone with a similar setup can give advice on how it is with theirs

I've already done that once in this forum *grin*; here's the link.

Thanks to anyone for any ideas, but there's no need to suggest using the ATI proprietary drivers. That's not something I want to do.

PS: Oops...the earlier link didn't include monitor info. It's probably not the issue, but it's not like it's a secret *grin*: 21" Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 120u, running 1024x768. After reviewing all the screenshots I could find on here, and the general comments, I note that this isn't common, which is good in the whole. Not good for me in specific, of course, and it makes me suspect it's some issue w/ the R300 XOrg driver. That's my gut feel right now unless it's some VERY weird font issue. I gotta go look at the known issues, bugfixes for R300 now...hopefully, if I can track it down, it something fixable on either the XOrg or the LL side. Which would rock.

Again, thanks for all info and suggestions.

Relatively good news...I'm in contact with the r300 Mesa library folks, and it does appear to be a driver issue. So not good in a sense, (ie, it's a driver bug), but they seem to recognize it, and the driver is in active development. It's possible it's already fixed in CVS...I'm going to try building the CVS head libraries, and retest.

Thanks for all the suggestions and info. LL Developers, I will let you know if/when the r300 driver fix for this is in place.