Gentoo recently added the release candidate to the main tree, so I decided to install KWord and give it a try.

However, when I started it, I found that the fonts are awful.
Here's a screenshot with KWord and OpenOffice side-by-side showing identical text:
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/4372/fontsi.png

The fonts look blurry as if they were an image of tiny text that was scaled up.

Is it just me (something was misconfigured or missing during the build), or is that how KWord normally looks?

Sounds a little like This bug

In comment #2 Thomas Zander explains what's going on.

Thanks, that looks a lot like it, although in my case it looks a lot uglier.

Looking at the screenshot I think you would already benefit quite a bit by turning off the subpixel antialiasing in the kde systemsettings.

zander wrote:Looking at the screenshot I think you would already benefit quite a bit by turning off the subpixel antialiasing in the kde systemsettings.

I don't have subpixel rendering enabled...


Also, here's a screenshot at 400x:



The fonts are really not rendering properly. Notice that Nimbus Sans has problems too - at size 10, the 'm' and 'b', as well as "i" and "s" are colliding. It looks normal with size 12, though, and if I print it out, it also looks perfectly normal.

See the linked bugreport, your case is explained totally by the comment I wrote there.
Only solution is to get a higher-resolution (more DPI) display.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand why it has anything to do with my monitor's DPI if when I zoom 400x it looks nothing like what I see if I zoom 400% onto my paper.

And I don't understand why it's better to have unoptimized fonts that are painful to read, when a word processor is most often sued to write and edit documents. Is there a way to switch to a screen-readable mode, so that I can just type up a paper and not worry that if I place my paper against the screen at 100% it will match as best as the screen can handle? I'm sorry, but there's a reason why they make fonts render nicely on the screen - if my eyes start bleeding after 10 minutes minutes of working, it's not very usable.

If KWord rendered text like its PDF output, that would have been wonderful, but the way it is now, it looks more like a scaled up screenshot than what I actually get on paper.

A text mode is planned for 2.1

zander wrote:A text mode is planned for 2.1

That's good

I'm sorry, but I don't get it. Have a look at this screenshot:
http://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=34534

Kword's font rendering is just awful - especially with small fonts. It becomes almost unreadable which makes kword in some cases pretty useless. Have a look at OOWriter in comparison in the screenshot. This just looks great. Why can't kword make it like this?

zander wrote:A text mode is planned for 2.1

Zander, I have the same problem (see here), but I have a 24" display at 1920x1200. The monitor can not get much bigger!

I read the bug, but (and no offense intended) why does it work with OO and more specifically, why does it work with the system fonts and not with others?

Am I missing something? 75% -- 200%

In fact, I prefer how KWord looks at 75%... OpenOffice is too, "hard".

WYSIWYG or not, Kword is simply not usable in its current state.

It's hard to believe that nobody did detect this bug earlier in the dev process.

I'm thinking of switching my company over to KDE and I looked at my friend's install. I gotta say, the fonts are absolutely terrible. Makes me consider gnome vs xfce instead.

Just because KWord has bad fonts is not a reason to not switch use KDE. OpenOffice's Qt4 integration is pretty decent.