Adorable fonts on your linux box

While Mahmoud was showing me how he is debugging the plan9 kernel, The eye catching sharpness and beauty of fonts on his linux m/c charmed me. Having suffered a lot from fonts on Linux without actually seeking a solution, I promptly asked him. He told me about libfreetype and how they use a very decent font rendering algorithm. I gave it a look, it turned out that they reverse engineered reserved bytecode in the TTF format which apple used for there beautiful font rendering. FreeType developers knowing that the algorithm is patented they disabled it by default, yet it can be enabled by a flag at compile time ...luckily the major Linux distros enable it. The issue was to find proprietary fonts... you will need webcore font package but it doesn't have the whole thing, you need to search for some fonts in your safari for windows installation and in windows fonts itself.
tldp has a tutor on the issue here .