X TrueType font spacing

[Malcolm Kay]

On Wed, 11 Jun 2003 22:52, Jesse D. Guardiani wrote:
> parv wrote:
> > in message <bc5h87$nb8$1 at main.gmane.org>, wrote Jesse D. Guardiani
> > thusly...
> >
> >> EVERY TIME, the WXP fonts will display fine in MOST KDE
> >> applications, but occassionally (like in Konqueror) the horizontal
> >> spacing will be all messed up.
> >>
> >> Basically, every line of text will look like this:
> >>
> >> T   H   I   S    I  S   A   G  O  O  D   E  X  A  M  P  L  E
> >>
> >> Does anyone know what causes that? And how to fix it?!?
> >
> > Looks like something somewhere is defining "charwidth" (mention in
> > fvwm(1) regarding use of TTF in relation to xft).
>
> I'm not running fvwm or xft. Straight X server (4.3.0) and KDE (3.1.x).
>
> Surely someone has had this problem before after installing Windows
> TrueType fonts! It happens to me EVERY TIME, and it happens whether
> the OS is FreeBSD or linux.
>
> Perhaps I should subscribe to a XFree86 mailling list and ask there.
>

This looks like the effect I get if I (wrongly) use a proportional font in an 
application that is designed to use a fixed width font -- the effect is
not restricted to TTF.

For example opening an xterm in an helvetica font:
  beta:203> xterm -fn '-*-helvetica-*-r-*-*-14-*-*-*-*-*-*-*'

Malcolm Kay