Wednesday, September 06, 2006

A font of wisdom...

My laptop is a Dell (and though a candidate for it, mercifully free of the battery problem). Actually, I've had that battery problem explained in painstaking detail, as I designed a LiIon pack into a product we're developing, so people at work were a little concerned lest we fall victim to the same problem as Dell--so I've been brushing up, with our battery cell vendor, on exactly what happened at Sony and reasons why it shouldn't concern us.

In any case, this Dell machine I've got has some not-too-shabby Radeon X1400 graphics built-in (with 128MB of dedicated video memory, thank-you-very-much), and a screen resolution of 1280x800. I'm using ATI's custom driver for X (bad free software supporter) and Mandriva looks pretty good.

However, I didn't realize what I was missing until I read this piece on the Optimal use of fonts on Linux, and installed a version of Freetype that included a proper Truetype byte code interpreter.

The results are quite astounding, and I've fallen in love with doing my writing on the laptop all over again. Sigh.