ROOT supports now also TrueType fonts on X11/Unix (it's the default for the Win32 version). The TrueType font rendering is done by the FreeType Engine. The FreeType library supports advanced features like font hinting and smoothing (anti-aliasing). Both features are used in the ROOT interface to FreeType. The fonts used by ROOT are kindly provided by Microsoft and are freely available via their TrueType Fonts web page.

To see the difference between scaled X11 and TrueType fonts see the "before" and "after" pictures (compare side-by-side, especially note the axis numbering and the slanted histogram title). The differences speak for themselves.

The TrueType facility in ROOT is built as a pure plugin. This means that the FreeType library and the ROOT FreeType interface library ($ROOTSYS/lib/libGX11TTF.so) are only loaded if ROOT finds at startup the directory as specified by the resource flag "Root.TTFontPath" (the default is "$(HOME)/ttf/fonts"). You can also control the usage of TrueType fonts with the resource flag "Root.UseTTFonts" in your private .rootrc file (the default is "true").

To get TrueType fonts working in ROOT on your machine, just follow these steps:

• Download the file ttf_fonts.tar.gz.
  This tar file contains the needed Microsoft TrueType fonts. The Microsoft fonts are also available packed in the original file corfonts.exe. To unpack and install these fonts use the InstallFonts script (shift click to download the script).
• Untar the file using "gtar zxvf ttf_fonts.tar.gz" and move the resulting ttf directory to $HOME.
• Finally, check that $ROOTSYS/etc/system.rootrc or your private $HOME/.rootrc file have the "Root.TTFontPath" resource correctly set (to "$(HOME)/ttf/fonts").

Getting libttf.a for Building ROOT from Source

• Download the FreeType source file.
  Build the libttf.a library (on many Linux systems this step is not needed as /usr/lib/libttf.a already exists). Since the build process is not entirely trivial we provide precompiled libraries (ttflib.xxx.tar.gz) for all supported platforms. Next check the ./configure options on how to specify the libttf location and the ttf font directory. On most Linux machines libttf is autodetected. For example: ./configure linux --with-ttf-fontdir=/usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType