Crummy looking fonts in KDE

Question

I'm new to Arch and finally got XFree up and running. However, the fonts on KDE look terrible and out of proportion. Tried changing all my fonts in the configuration menus to Times, which I know to be fairly clean in Windows but I still get funny looking fonts that strain my eyes. Any help for a newbie on where to go with this problem would be greatly appreciated, thanks. I also have a flat panel monitor.
JSkier

Answer 1

I've had my share of troubles with fonts, but after lots of hard work, I realized that there are ways to solve problems.  I'd like to say first off that I agree fully with the bytecode interpreter being enabled.  I also agree that the msttcorefonts should be installed, along with the bitstream vera fonts.
However, most people get discouraged, because the Bitstream Vera fonts look awesome antialiased, and the corefonts look awesome not antialiased.  But I have yet to see a GUI that lets you configure which font families are antialiased and which ones are not.  So I played with fonts.conf a bit, and to my delight, I came up with something that works for me and should work for most.
Put this in your ~/.fonts.conf :
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<dir>~/.fonts</dir>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<test compare="eq" name="family" qual="any" >
<string>Arial</string>
<string>Arial Black</string>
<string>Comic Sans MS</string>
<string>Courier New</string>
<string>Georgia</string>
<string>Tahoma</string>
<string>Times New Roman</string>
<string>Trebuchet MS</string>
<string>Verdana</string>
<string>Webdings</string>
</test>
<test compare="less" name="size" qual="any" >
<double>16</double>
</test>
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<test compare="eq" name="family" qual="any" >
<string>Arial</string>
<string>Arial Black</string>
<string>Comic Sans MS</string>
<string>Courier New</string>
<string>Georgia</string>
<string>Tahoma</string>
<string>Times New Roman</string>
<string>Trebuchet MS</string>
<string>Verdana</string>
<string>Webdings</string>
</test>
<test compare="less" name="pixelsize" qual="any" >
<double>18</double>
</test>
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
Basically this sets all fonts antialiased, but excludes the Microsoft corefonts.  I have left Impact antialiased because I feel it looks better that way.  But that can be changed at your discretion.
I hope this helps someone!