Ubuntu with SlickEdit 13 - Horrible fonts?

[Ryan0751]

I just moved to a new Ubuntu 10.04.4 (this is a company machine, this was provided) Linux box.  I installed Slick Edit 2013, but the fonts look pretty awful.

Is there a fix for this?  I can manually go into the 20 categories and select things that "kinda look a little better but not really".  But I shouldn't have to do that....

[ehab]

i installed wine and fonts are ok.
maybe search what wine installs for fonts and that would help you.

[patrick]

Which window manager? 

Off the top of my head, the only problem I've had with v18 on linux with all of the fonts looking horrible was a system where the auto detected DPI for the monitor was hilariously low.  It was an older version of the KDE desktop, and I eventually found a place in the desktop settings where I could switch it from auto-detect to a hardcoded DPI.

[Ryan0751]

I am running with gnome

[Ryan0751]

I should add, the actual fonts being used for Gnome itself look nice.  Only SlickeEdit looks really bad.

[patrick]

Odd.  Can you post a screen shot so I can see how they actually look? It might give me a clue as to what's going on.

Do you have a ~/.fonts.conf file?  If you rename it and then start up SlickEdit, do the fonts look better or worse?   If you did have one, could you post the contents of that as well?

[Ryan0751]

Sure.  Here is a screen capture.  The code window is about as good as I can get it.  The "about" window is the default awfulness. 

What is painful is I'm VNC'ing to my Linux box from a retina MBP, so this looks REALLY BAD compared to my Mac

[patrick]

Ahh, glad you mentioned the VNC, that makes a difference.

Yeah, that looks bad.  I can't get it to look bad like that VNCing into a more recent version of ubuntu, so I'll have to try it with one of our Ubuntu 10.04 images and see if I can reproduce it.  Out of curiosity, which VNC client are you using on your mac?

[Ryan0751]

This is through "Chicken of the VNC"

The actual fonts in Ubuntu look fine, however.  Check out the menu titles and such.

[Ryan0751]

So it looks like if I go into the Ubuntu appearance preferences, and disable smoothing, I replicate in Ubuntu directly the ugly fonts I see in slickedit. 

So how do I enable smoothing in slickedit?

[patrick]

There isn't a switch for that in SE.  (closest would be the anti-aliasing checkbox in the Fonts configuration page.  Double check it, but the image you sent looks worse to me than just having that diabled - more like it's rendering assuming a resolution different from the actual resolution).

Qt determines how to do the font rendering based on what desktop environment it detects, ideally so desktop specific settings make a difference.  (so for my KDE example, fiddling with DPI and other font settings in the KDE setup actually makes a difference with font rendering in the editor, once you restart the editor).  Since it works fine for your other apps, my suspicion is that something about running under the vnc server on Ubuntu 10 is confusing it, and coming up with a pretty poor font rendering setup.   I'll have access to a Unbuntu 10.04 system a little bit later this morning, so I'll be able to see what's actually going on, assuming I reproduce it.

[patrick]

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get it to look worse than the desktop looks.

A couple of things to try:

VNC to it from something that doesn't have a retina display and see if it looks better.  While there may be more going on since the desktop looks better than the editor, from talking to a mac developer, the screenshot looks a lot like what you'd get from the scaling that happens when you run an app that isn't retina aware on a retina system.  (Chicken of the VNC is probably old enough to not support it - the newer Chicken may be, but I couldn't tell one way or the other from searching).   Does the system have a monitor, and if so, does the SE fonts look worse than the desktop when you run it at the system?   

Second, kill the editor, and run it from the command line like this (you might have to apt-get install strace if you don't have it installed already):  strace -f -o tr.txt /opt/slickedit/vs +new
That will generate a tr.txt file in your current directory that you can attach to a forum reply.  I should be able to compare it with my own and get a high level idea of what's being set up differently.

[Ryan0751]

Attached it the tr.txt output.

I am running this on an external display.  I should add, even with a monitor connected directly to this machine, it looks bad.  I'm not sure that it's just a display issue.

I ran qtconfig, the fonts look the same as in SlickEdit (un-smoothed).

[Ryan0751]

I think I'm going to switch gears here... I found I can easily mount my source tree using SSHFS on my MacBook, therefore I can just run the Mac native SlickEdit and get a much better experience than using VNC. 

I also wrote a little script to go off and do my build remotely as well.

The remaining piece is getting my Perforce to work in SlickEdit.