Arch Linux

cm

Member

Registered: 2013-07-24

Posts: 32

[config?] All truetype/opentype fonts except Dejavu look bad

No matter what I do (no custom user fontconfig or some config based on the wiki page) the only font which consistently looks readable is Dejavu installed via pacman. If I install Dejavu into a user configured font path or try any other non-pcf font from that path in a fontconfig application (e.g. Gtk apps) the font looks either too thin, too thick or too small. What am I doing wrong? Didn't find anything that could fix it in the arch wiki. Tried fonts which people praise that I can't get to work when put in a user home dir fonts dir: Adobe Source * fonts, Mozilla's Fira, Tinos. Help?

Chazza

Wiki Maintainer

Registered: 2013-06-02

Posts: 506

Re: [config?] All truetype/opentype fonts except Dejavu look bad

I find that the best font set is ttf-liberation. It's the ttf font set from Red Hat. Pretty much all applications are configured to use it and just installing it seems to fix a lot of rendering issues. You can install it from the ttf-liberation package which is in the official repos.

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,545

Website

Re: [config?] All truetype/opentype fonts except Dejavu look bad

So deja vu isn't the pattern, the pattern is pacman-installed versus your 'user configured font path'.  Can you describe what the latter is/means?  How do you install these fonts?  Have you added that path to your Xorg config?  Have you done mkfontdir/mkfontscale/rehashed/etc?

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

Chazza

Wiki Maintainer

Registered: 2013-06-02

Posts: 506

Re: [config?] All truetype/opentype fonts except Dejavu look bad

EDIT: Responding to wrong person. Sorry.

Last edited by Chazza (2014-05-24 16:48:48)

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,114

Re: [config?] All truetype/opentype fonts except Dejavu look bad

When you installed dejavu manually did you include its .conf files for fontconfig?

cm

Member

Registered: 2013-07-24

Posts: 32

Re: [config?] All truetype/opentype fonts except Dejavu look bad

When you installed dejavu manually did you include its .conf files for fontconfig?

Yes I copied dejavu's conf files to ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d.

cm

Member

Registered: 2013-07-24

Posts: 32

Re: [config?] All truetype/opentype fonts except Dejavu look bad

So deja vu isn't the pattern, the pattern is pacman-installed versus your 'user configured font path'.  Can you describe what the latter is/means?  How do you install these fonts?  Have you added that path to your Xorg config?  Have you done mkfontdir/mkfontscale/rehashed/etc?

.xsession runs xset +fp ~/.fonts and all the fonts are there and I have run mkfontdir/mkfontscale/fc-cache --really-force. The fonts are available but for example Source Sans Pro when viewed in a gtk+2 font chooser has many variants to select which you cannot select in Firefox's font settings and the result is suboptimal. After seeing that dejavu installed via pacman (I had no dejavu installed first) looks fine in all gtk guis I got suspicious.

cm

Member

Registered: 2013-07-24

Posts: 32

Re: [config?] All truetype/opentype fonts except Dejavu look bad

I find that the best font set is ttf-liberation. It's the ttf font set from Red Hat. Pretty much all applications are configured to use it and just installing it seems to fix a lot of rendering issues. You can install it from the ttf-liberation package which is in the official repos.

Funny you mention that as the liberation fonts also looked bad when installed manually into ~/.fonts which I shared between machines and that's the reason I didn't look for an arch package. Didn't try installing with pacman.

martinjh@blueyonder.co.uk

Member

From: Lancashire UK

Registered: 2013-06-06

Posts: 3

Re: [config?] All truetype/opentype fonts except Dejavu look bad

Go here - http://www.infinality.net/ - There are arch packages too. This is a set of fonts and patched libraries that have been designed to get good rendering in Linux...

Here is the forum thread - https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162098

Last edited by martinjh@blueyonder.co.uk (2014-05-25 13:44:18)

cm

Member

Registered: 2013-07-24

Posts: 32

Re: [config?] All truetype/opentype fonts except Dejavu look bad

Go here - http://www.infinality.net/ - There are arch packages too. This is a set of fonts and patched libraries that have been designed to get good rendering in Linux...

Here is the forum thread - https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=162098

One step at a time and do you know why the infinality patches aren't upstream yet?

Before I try infinality and diverge from the default the difference of pacman installed vs ~/.fonts + ~/.config/fontconfig installed dejavu fonts has to be solved.