[SOLVED] Firefox messes up ligatures when displaying Calibri font

vitoreiji · 2012-02-29 18:46:31

Hi,
This problem has been bothering me for a while and I can't figure out what's wrong.
To ilustrate this, here are a few quotes from Coding Horror, one affected site:

It's difficult to fix without making major changes to the web's infrastructure.

For example, I just noticed that Twitter, transparently to me and presumably all other Twitter users [...]

[...] such as swiping left or right with four fingers to switch between apps.

In bold are the charecters that stand out (and I mean it) when reding the text. I dare not post a screenshot, for I believe this may kill your soul as it has been slowly killing mine.
So far, Calibri is the only font that I found that shows this behaviour, and it's not in all programs. Some affected programs are Firefox and Thunderbird. In LibreOffice, for example, it shows normaly.
I do not remember having done any font configuration in my system, but I'm not sure where I should check...
Thanks for your help!

Last edited by vitoreiji (2012-03-04 06:29:21)

bohoomil · 2012-02-29 20:55:22

Which freetype2 branch are you using?

Edit: Despite freetype2, you may try putting

<!-- Use embedded bitmaps in fonts like Calibri? -->
<match target="font" >
	<edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
		<bool>false</bool>
	</edit>
</match>

somewhere in your fontconfig files (or first check where it sits in your /etc/fonts/conf.d and disable it).

Last edited by bohoomil (2012-02-29 20:58:30)

vitoreiji · 2012-03-01 15:58:41

Hi bohoomil, thank you for your suggestion! I tried

$ cat /etc/fonts/conf.avail/75-fix-calibri.conf 
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<!-- Use embedded bitmaps in fonts like Calibri? -->
        <match target="font" >
                <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
                        <bool>false</bool>
                </edit>
        </match>
</fontconfig>
$ ls -l /etc/fonts/conf.d/75-fix-calibri.conf 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 33 Mar  1 12:43 /etc/fonts/conf.d/75-fix-calibri.conf -> ../conf.avail/75-fix-calibri.conf

And after restarting X it looks a lot better, but the ligatures still look a little bit different, kind of slightly bold. Any other ideas?
And I don't know what you mean by 'freetype2 branch' but here's a basic pacman query if it helps:

$ pacman -Qs freetype2
local/freetype2 2.4.8-1
    TrueType font rendering library

Thanks again!

bohoomil · 2012-03-01 19:43:49

There are nice patches for freetype2 that can make fonts look much better (even those tricky ones, like Calibri). In order to do so, you may want to replace some of your packages:

* freetype2 with freetype2-infinality,
* fontconfig with fontconfig-infinality,
* libxft with libxft-cleartype,
* cairo with cairo-ubuntu.

They should significantly improve the rendering of your fonts. Of course, you can always check other versions of the packages in the AUR: I assume that the above combination should be safe in most cases, and the final result satisfactory for the user.

Edit 1: It's worth reading the Wiki article on font configuration to get the idea what and how can be tweaked.

Edit 2: And here comes a screenshot:

Last edited by bohoomil (2012-03-01 19:56:27)

vitoreiji · 2012-03-01 20:13:28

A friend of mine recomended me these packages some time ago: freetype2-infinality, fontconfig-ubuntu, libxft-ubuntu, cairo-ubuntu
But I was too lazy to check them out back then. I'll try your suggestions later and post a screenshot, thanks!

vitoreiji · 2012-03-04 06:28:52

Finally I got around to trying some different things out, I currently have freetype2-infinality, fontconfig-infinality, libxft-cleartype and cairo-ubuntu-xcb (I use awesome window manager, which needs xcb). I did have to make some slight changes to the depends array in that last one to be able to use fontconfig-infinality and libxft-cleartype, I'm not sure it was the best thing to do but I don't see any major errors.
And yes, the ligature problem is completely gone now, so thank you very much!

chetwisniewski · 2012-11-20 18:26:04

This has been driving me batty for months. Thanks for the tips. There is no longer a package for freetype2-cleartype as I believe it was merged upstream. There is a bit of wonkiness in the cairo-ubuntu depends, but it looks like it is being worked out. I was able to simple replace the reference to fontconfig-ubuntu with fontconfig and it built just fine.

Chester

Arch Linux

#1 2012-02-29 18:46:31

[SOLVED] Firefox messes up ligatures when displaying Calibri font

#2 2012-02-29 20:55:22

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox messes up ligatures when displaying Calibri font

#3 2012-03-01 15:58:41

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox messes up ligatures when displaying Calibri font

#4 2012-03-01 19:43:49

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox messes up ligatures when displaying Calibri font

#5 2012-03-01 20:13:28

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox messes up ligatures when displaying Calibri font

#6 2012-03-04 06:28:52

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox messes up ligatures when displaying Calibri font

#7 2012-11-20 18:26:04

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox messes up ligatures when displaying Calibri font

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