Arch Linux

kens

Member

Registered: 2011-11-11

Posts: 29

Getting Consolas font to look like Windows

Hey all,

I just got Arch installed with KDE, and I must say I'm liking it a lot because Arch seems like the only distro with up to date versions of chrome and gcc. But I digress.

I'm having problems getting fonts to look good. I've tried following the directions on the Fonts page on the wiki with regards to subpixel rendering (which might end up not being the problem, I don't know), but it hasn't helped. In particular, my favourite font, Consolas, looks pretty bad on Arch.

Here's Windows 7, which is how I would like it to look:

And here's Arch:

The Arch version isn't nearly as smooth, and it looks especially bad in the console (Konsole) and in my web browser (Chrome). Does anyone know how to fix this problem? Thanks.

Last edited by kens (2011-11-12 21:29:05)

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: Getting Consolas font to look like Windows

Search for the threads mentioning Infinality.

GTK apps use cairo, so they simply use our patched-in beautiful font rendering, but KDE and Chrome like to deviate in wacky ways apparently (I don't use 'em).

kens

Member

Registered: 2011-11-11

Posts: 29

Re: Getting Consolas font to look like Windows

Hi brebs, thanks for the reply. I had tried installing infinality, but I can't because pacman says this:

$ sudo pacman -U freetype2-infinality-2.4.7-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz 
resolving dependencies...
looking for inter-conflicts...
:: freetype2-infinality and freetype2-ubuntu are in conflict (freetype2). Remove freetype2-ubuntu? [y/N] y
error: failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies)
:: fontconfig-ubuntu: requires freetype2-ubuntu>=2.3.11
:: libxft-ubuntu: requires freetype2-ubuntu

I'm sorry if this is a stupid mistake, I'm pretty new to Arch and linux in general. What should I do?

Last edited by kens (2011-11-12 22:14:01)

JHeaton

Member

From: United Kingdom

Registered: 2009-05-16

Posts: 158

Re: Getting Consolas font to look like Windows

You'd need to replace fontconfig-ubuntu and libxft-ubuntu with the vanilla fontconfig and libxft packages. As an alternative to the freetype2-infinality package, you could also try the cleartype-patched packages, which have worked quite well for me in the past and displayed Consolas almost identically to how it is shown in Windows 7.