Search the knowledgebase


Enabling anti-aliased/smooth fonts in Opera

NOTE: This information applies to Opera 6.0x and earlier. Starting with Opera 6.1, Opera supports anti-aliasing even when you use the static version.

In order to use anti-aliasing with Opera 6.0x, you need two things to get started:

  1. The dynamic/shared version of Opera (dynamically linked to Qt)
  2. The correct version of Qt

You can download Opera from our download pages. When downloading the dynamic/shared version of Opera, please remember to download the correct package. You may find that there are different dynamic packages, depending on your distribution.

When it comes to Qt, Opera 6.02 uses Qt 2.3.2, and we therefore recommend this version. However, any version of Qt 2.3.x should work. It can be downloaded from TrollTech's FTP server or mirror sites:

ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qt/source/qt-x11-2.3.2.tar.gz

In order for anti-aliasing to work, both Qt and your X system must be compiled with support for it.

Once you have Qt and Opera installed, you must enable anti-aliasing by setting the environment variable QT_XFT to "true". If you are running the "bash" shell, enter the following command on the command prompt or in a terminal window:

export QT_XFT=true

To enable this automatically every time you log in, add this line to your ~/.bashrc file.

When this is done, you can start Opera.