Avi Alkalay has written a great document on optimal use of fonts on Linux. Following his instructions, it is easy to get high-quality TrueType fonts on your screen with Fedore Core 5.

First, decide if you want to replace the freetype package with a version in which the Bytecode Interpreter (BCI) is enabled. There may be legal issues with this in your country - see the Freetype page on patents for more information.

Below is a side-by-side screenshot, done with the same TrueType fonts, but with BCI disabled (left) and BCI enabled (right).

The Fedora 7 freetype package with BCI can be found here. For other distributions, see Get a Better FreeType RPM. And don't forget to restart your X server after upgrading the RPM.

The next thing you need is a set of TrueType fonts, like the Webcore Fonts. Before downloading the RPM, be sure to read the legal notice on Avi's page.

All that remains is to configure Gnome, KDE, Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice to use your shiny new fonts. Step-by-step instructions can be found in Configure Your Desktop.

Update 6 Jul 2006: One thing to note when configuring Thunderbird is that it has a list of separate font settings. The default "Western" font setting is only used for mails encoded with ISO-8859. To get the same fonts for UTF8 mails, you have to set the fonts for "Other Languages".