KDE 3.0Alpha1 Developer's Release Ships

The KDE Project has just announced the release of KDE 3.0Alpha1,
the inaugural release of the
KDE 3 series. This release is targeted at developers, though experimental
users might want to check it out (be sure to read the
instructions for
installing KDE 3 alongside your KDE 2 desktop). The principal changes from the
recently-released KDE 2.2.1 stem
from the switch to Qt 3. However, that switch does bring with it an impressive
array of feature enhancements, including new database classes, new data-aware
widgets, improved RAD development with a much-enhanced Qt Designer, a new
powerful regular expression class (with full Unicode support),
improved internationalization support (including the ability to mix different
character sets in the same text), bi-directional language support (for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew),
multi-monitor (Xinerama and multi-screen) support, better integration of pure
Qt applications into KDE, and hardware-accelerated alpha blending. With
the Qt port out of the way, the KDE developers can now focus on the
planned
KDE improvements. Read the full announcement
here, or go straight to the
source
(alternative
link
).

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Comments

by Blue (not verified)

does anyone know if the godawful font problems are fixed in qt3?

in case you haven't run into these problems... you don't do enough graphic design work. :)

problem 1: with lots of fonts installed (~2000), kde slows to a crawl. everything is slow. launching apps is slooooooww. god help you if you try to change fonts - the font dialog windows take upwards of two minutes to appear, and often crash all of kde.

problem 2: no matter what fonts you pick, the wrong ones are used in some places. it seems to pick the first font in the list of available fonts, for e.g. lots of text on webpages. try installing e.g. "101 puppies sw" (ftp://ftp.linuxpower.org/fonts/serif-sans-serif/101pup.zip) - you'll get tons of text that's unreadable because of the font

any clues?

by Thilo Bangert (not verified)

Problem 1:
i've read many places, that the X font renderer is the bottleneck here. sure its qt's fault?

problem 2:
i had this problem when i installed lots of (ttf)fonts. the problem was, that the default font was set to helvetica, which for some reason was not available any more. when the default is not available it takes the first font it finds, which obviously would be "101 puppies sw" (alphabetical order). before you installed the new font(s) "Arial" probably was your first font, which meant that you did not notice the difference.

this is a konfiguration problem of your KDE/XFT setup and not qt's fault.
anybody know how to get helvetica to work again?

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

Helvetica is supposedly available only in Type 1. It comes with Adobe Acrobat Reader 3.x and the AFM files are on Adobe's FTP.

Or, the site: http://www.downloadheaven.co.uk/ appears to have Helvetica TTF.

Common wisdom would be that this is an illegal copy so I would use the Type 1 version.

JRT

by ik (not verified)

ar you using qt3 with or without xaa fonts ?
(if you do with try without and the other way around)

by Hesham Hassan (not verified)

Problem 1: I used to have that problem, and unless I am mistaken, there is no lag time starting up my programs no matter how many fonts I have ~1500. PIII 500, GeForce DDR w/latest NVidia Driver, XFree86 4.10, KDE CVS 05/10/2001, QT 3.0 beta 6.

by not me (not verified)

Yes, I think there was a problem with the X Render extension where it would re-parse its config file every time a new program was started. The new XFree has a better version that caches this info so it doesn't have to be parsed again.