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robotangel

Member

From: cologne/germany

Registered: 2007-08-30

Posts: 63

[SOLVED] Firefox: Ugly UI fonts

Hi there,

Firefox looks really ugly on one of my systems because it seems to render the fonts in a pretty ugly way (see for yourself: https://i.imgur.com/cfypAOU.png). The fonts on the rendered webpages look alright.

The problem doesn't occur with other KDE, GTK2 or GTK3 applications  and neither on my laptop, which is mostly set up the same (Plasma with breeze theme and Fira Sans Font, GTK settings made inside the GTK theme configurator system settings module [from kde-gtk-config]: GTK2 oxygen theme, GTK3 Adwaita theme, Fira Sans). Does anybody have an idea why Firefox does this on this system? Is there a please-render-my-fonts-prettier config setting somewhere that I have missed ?

Thank you very much in advance!

Last edited by robotangel (2016-04-14 13:03:31)

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox: Ugly UI fonts

Have you installed a decent selection of fonts?

Can see fonts available, with:

fc-match -a

Thorsten Reinbold

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-12-06

Posts: 353

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox: Ugly UI fonts

Have you tried the infinality patchset?

Last edited by Thorsten Reinbold (2016-03-27 13:48:54)

robotangel

Member

From: cologne/germany

Registered: 2007-08-30

Posts: 63

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox: Ugly UI fonts

Hi,

thanks for your reply! Yes, my selection of fonts should be big enough for Firefox to pick a nice-looking one

marco@pc ~ % fc-match -a | wc -l
1284
marco@pc ~ % pacman -Qs ttf
local/noto-fonts 20151224-2
    Google Noto TTF fonts
local/ttf-dejavu 2.35-1
    Font family based on the Bitstream Vera Fonts with a wider range of characters
local/ttf-fira-mono 2:3.206-1
    Mozilla's monospace typeface designed for Firefox OS
local/ttf-fira-sans 1:4.202-1
    Mozilla's sans-serif typeface designed for Firefox OS
local/ttf-liberation 2.00.1-6
    Red Hats Liberation fonts.
local/ttf-ms-win10 10.0.10240-2
    Microsoft Windows 10 TrueType fonts
local/ttf-oxygen 1:5.4.3-1
    The Oxygen font family. A desktop/gui font family for integrated use with the KDE desktop
local/ttf-ubuntu-font-family 0.83-1
    Ubuntu font family

I would prefer if Firefox could use Fira Sans like the rest of my system. What it is using seems to be the Oxygen font, but I'm not sure. Even if it is, it probably shouldn't look like that.

Thanks again!

EDIT:

Hello Thorsten,

thanks for you reply, too. I would prefer not having to build freetype myself for every new version. The rest of my system looks ok as far as I can tell and as it works on my laptop there has to be another way

Last edited by robotangel (2016-03-25 23:03:32)

Thorsten Reinbold

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-12-06

Posts: 353

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox: Ugly UI fonts

You don't need to rebuild anything, Watch the link, there is a repo for that.

Daerandin

Member

From: Norway

Registered: 2013-05-07

Posts: 280

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox: Ugly UI fonts

You don't need to rebuild anything, Watch the link, there is a repo for that.

Your link does not point to a valid page. Remove the trailing slash from your link and it will point to the correct page.

robotangel

Member

From: cologne/germany

Registered: 2007-08-30

Posts: 63

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox: Ugly UI fonts

Hello there,

even if it wasn't my initial plan I decided to install infinality bundle to see what it'd do to my system fonts. I have to admit that I actually very much like what it does Thanks for the tip!

Firefox's UI fonts do look much nicer now (not so washed-out, I guess that's how it's meant to look) but it still doesn't use my system fonts and the one it uses is not a nice font after all... Does anyone know where Firefox does get its UI font setting from? Gtk2? Gtk3? Somewhere completely different? I can't imagine that it's hardcoded somewhere as on my other machines it seems like it's using the correct system fonts.

Thanks in advance!

Thorsten Reinbold

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-12-06

Posts: 353

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox: Ugly UI fonts

You don't need to rebuild anything, Watch the link, there is a repo for that.

Your link does not point to a valid page. Remove the trailing slash from your link and it will point to the correct page.

Thanks. It should work now.

equeim

Member

Registered: 2016-03-27

Posts: 22

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox: Ugly UI fonts

This is a bug in Firefox. You can fix it by setting gfx.font_rendering.fontconfig.fontlist.enabled to false in about:config. However it can cause font issues on some web pages.

robotangel

Member

From: cologne/germany

Registered: 2007-08-30

Posts: 63

Re: [SOLVED] Firefox: Ugly UI fonts

Hi there,

unfortunately, the gfx.font_rendering.fontconfig.fontlist.enabled had no effect for me. I recently tried lxappearance to set my gtk theme and fonts. After that, it looked a bit better again (seems like the KDE gtk chooser didn't really work right, maybe a bug?). Considering it already looked a lot better with the infinality packages it certainly looks good enough for me now (however, not as good as on my laptop, for some, still unknown, reason). Anyway, I'm going to mark this as SOLVED now, as it really looks a lot better than before and good enough for me

Thanks all!