[RP] Pretty fonts

[Joshua Neuheisel]

Hello all,

 

Have you ever wondered what ratpoison would look like (as though a window manager looks like anything) with fonts rendered with the beautiful FreeType extensions to X?  I did, so I put together a patch that adds Xft support to ratpoison.  Xft is the X interface library to the FreeType font rendering library.  With this patch, you can view ratpoison's window list and license page in full anti-aliased glory.

 

Although the patch is easy to apply (I'll describe that below), the hard part is actually getting Xft and X setup correctly.  If you have a recent Linux distribution (I'm running RedHat 9) that work is probably done for you.  Otherwise, you'll need to do a Google search to get the appropriate HOWTOs, etc (also check out fontconfig.org).  Here's a hint: If you have a recent version of mozilla and it displays anti-aliased fonts when rendering web pages, you're good to go.  Otherwise, you probably have some configuring to do.  As a personal aside, I suggest installing the very nice (free) bitstream fonts: http://www.gnome.org/fonts/.

 

With that out of the way, on to applying the path:

 

1. Get the current version of ratpoison in CVS (I figured most people who want to try this would probably have the latest version from CVS, but if people want a patch against any of the beta snapshots, just let me know).

$> cvs -d [blah, blah, blah] co ratpoison

 

2. Apply the patch

$> cd ratpoison

$> gunzip -c ../font.patch.gz | patch -p0

 

3. Configure.  You must use the option "--with-xft".  This option takes as an optional argument the name of the default font to use.

$> ./autogen.sh

$> ./configure --with-xft="Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-11"

 

4. Now make away

$> make

$> su

********

$> make install

 

5. When running ratpoison, use the "deffont" command to try different fonts: "deffont Courier-20", "deffont Arial-11", "deffont Sans-12", etc.

 

That's it!  Enjoy.  As always, feedback is welcome.

 

Joshua

 

font.patch.gz
Description: Binary data