3.2. Configure Your Desktop
General Guidelines
The main idea is to use good hinted fonts all around. As a general rule, we'll use Tahoma 8pt for desktop widgets, LucidaTypewriter 8pt for monospace text, and Verdana 8pt, 9pt or 10pt for fluent text reading or web surfing. These are the default font sizes on a Microsoft Windows desktop, and they look good on a 1024x768 screen. If you have a better screen resolution (1280x1024, 1600x1200) our suggestion is to stick with this fonts but increase their sizes.
We choose these fonts, specially Webcore font package , because they look perfect at small sizes (8pt, due to their excellent hinting), providing a more efficient screen utilization. They'll make your desktop look beautiful, professional, clean and comfortable. These fonts were designed for this purposes.
For window titles or text that will appear in bigger sizes, you may choose whatever you want because bigger sizes hinting are not so relevant.
3.2.1. A Note About Anti-Aliasing
Anti-Aliasing is a technique used to reduce the "steeper" effect on low-resolution medias, so it can be used to improve the quality of text on the screen. It is also used to blur the imperfections of bad hinted fonts at small sizes. For desktop widgets (usually with small size), some people think it makes the desktop look dirty.
So a practical conclusion we found is to use Anti-Aliasing for sizes bigger than 10pt, and use good hinted fonts for smaller sizes without Anti-Aliasing. Currently the best hinted fonts you can find, as we cited before, are the ones found in the Webcore font package .
3.2.2. KDE
To configure KDE, use the Control Center (kcontrol in the command line). This is how I have it configured.
Figure 1. General KDE font configuration
So we basically choosed Trebuchet 12pt as the window title font, the bitmap font LucidaTypewriter 8pt for fixed size text, and Tahoma 8pt for everything else, which includes menus, buttons, etc. The 2 first should follow your taste, but Tahoma 8pt for all the rest is the optimal configuration, also used by MS Windows 2000 and XP.
One other thing to note is that I disabled anti-aliasing for font sizes up to 9 points. Look at the entire dialog and see how all text is clearly rendered, looks clean precise and professional.
Konqueror (KDE's browser and file manager) also needs font configuration for beautiful web browsing and file management.
Figure 2. Konqueror File Management font configuration
We used the same Tahoma 8pt for rendering the list of files in Konqueror's window, because Tahoma was simply designed with this purpose in mind, with 8pt being its most important size, with no need of anti-aliasing to be clear and beautiful.
Figure 3. Konqueror Web Browsing font configuration
And this is finally for web browsing. We are using Verdana as the general font because it was simply designed for the purpose of fluent text reading on the screen. And the old LucidaTypewriter when a web page requested a fixed size font. Some may choose fonts like Courier or Bistream Vera Mono here.
We left all other fonts blank, to let the page choose it. But you may use Times New Roman as the Serif Font. Read more about serif fonts in Section 7.2.2 .
The sizes of the fonts for browsing are a bit personal and depends on how healthy are your eyes, and the resolution of your screen. In my 1024x768 screen I use default size as 8pt, and I don't want web pages to use sizes smaller than 7pt. In the end of the day, to set the size is not so effective because modern web pages use to set them with absolute values. So it is more practical to use the browsers View menu to "zoom" the page you are currently seeing.
One more thing to note is the Default Encoding . This is a quite complex subject that deserves an entire HOWTO, but it is generally OK to leave it as the
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