Arch Linux

jgott

Member

Registered: 2011-04-10

Posts: 21

[SOLVED] How to make small MS fonts antialiased?

I have the ttf-vista-fonts package installed because I like fonts like Calibri. However, at font sizes under 15 pt, that font (and one or two others in the set) gets rendered without antialiasing on, which really grates on the eyes considering that the other fonts on my system are antialiased at that size. To make matters horrendously worse, anytime a ligature occurs in the text ("tt", "fi", etc.), those letter pairs are antialiased! I copied the calibri TTF files over from a Windows installation and they are indeed the same files as on Windows, where it antialiases all the way down to 8 pt and possibly lower. From this I know it's something in my configuration.

What in my configuration is making this happen and what do I have to change to make this font antialias all the way down? Something in my fonts.conf maybe?

Last edited by jgott (2011-06-17 22:25:03)

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: [SOLVED] How to make small MS fonts antialiased?

Correct - fontconfig.

jgott

Member

Registered: 2011-04-10

Posts: 21

Re: [SOLVED] How to make small MS fonts antialiased?

What, in particular, do I need to change from the default configuration? I've looked through all the files in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ and /etc/fonts/conf.avail/ and I didn't find anything that explicitly specified to not antialias these particular fonts at small sizes. Did I overlook it, or do I need to add something to the config?

Last edited by jgott (2011-06-13 07:06:31)

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: [SOLVED] How to make small MS fonts antialiased?

See example config. Note the "pixelsize" test.

Unia

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2010-03-30

Posts: 2,486

Website

Re: [SOLVED] How to make small MS fonts antialiased?

This might be a noob question, but could you please elaborate on where to put that and how to et cetera? Will it just work to copy/paste that into my fonts.conf or is there extra stuff?

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If you can't sit by a cozy fire with your code in hand enjoying its simplicity and clarity, it needs more work. --Carlos Torres

jaco

Member

From: Toulouse, France

Registered: 2011-03-17

Posts: 149

Re: [SOLVED] How to make small MS fonts antialiased?

Have you read this link : https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration ? For my own, i've installed infinality.

Last edited by jaco (2011-06-16 21:15:32)

thayer

Fellow

From: Vancouver, BC

Registered: 2007-05-20

Posts: 1,560

Website

Re: [SOLVED] How to make small MS fonts antialiased?

Calibri has embedded bitmaps; this drove me nuts too. The easiest thing to do, depending on your current DE/WM, is to add the following lines to your ~/.fonts.conf

<!-- disable embedded bitmaps in fonts to fix Calibri, Cambria, etc. -->
<match target="font">
        <edit mode="assign" name="embeddedbitmap"><bool>false</bool></edit>
</match>

Check out my fonts.conf for more info. Websites like http://codinghorror.com used to look horrible before this fix.

Last edited by thayer (2011-06-17 02:17:25)

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thayer williams ~ cinderwick.ca

Unia

Member

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Registered: 2010-03-30

Posts: 2,486

Website

Re: [SOLVED] How to make small MS fonts antialiased?

Calibri has embedded bitmaps; this drove me nuts too. The easiest thing to do, depending on your current DE/WM, is to add the following lines to your ~/.fonts.conf

<!-- disable embedded bitmaps in fonts to fix Calibri, Cambria, etc. -->
<match target="font">
        <edit mode="assign" name="embeddedbitmap"><bool>false</bool></edit>
</match>

Check out my fonts.conf for more info. Websites like http://codinghorror.com used to look horrible before this fix.

Thank you, that at least made them look nice on Linux apps. They still look horrible in MS Office via Wine though

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If you can't sit by a cozy fire with your code in hand enjoying its simplicity and clarity, it needs more work. --Carlos Torres

jgott

Member

Registered: 2011-04-10

Posts: 21

Re: [SOLVED] How to make small MS fonts antialiased?

Calibri has embedded bitmaps; this drove me nuts too. The easiest thing to do, depending on your current DE/WM, is to add the following lines to your ~/.fonts.conf

<!-- disable embedded bitmaps in fonts to fix Calibri, Cambria, etc. -->
<match target="font">
        <edit mode="assign" name="embeddedbitmap"><bool>false</bool></edit>
</match>

Check out my fonts.conf for more info. Websites like http://codinghorror.com used to look horrible before this fix.

Thank you, this quick little snippet totally did the trick. And actually, Coding Horror was one of the places where I was constantly bugged by this in the recent past.