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tlvince

Member

Registered: 2010-07-06

Posts: 68

Website

[SOLVED] Distorted font rendering in Chromium tab bar/menus

My laptop's monitor is a slightly awkward 1920x1080 at 166 DPI, so not truely HiDPI, but large enough for the default assumed 96 DPI to render fonts way too small.

In a Gnome Wayland session, I've found keeping interface-scaling-factor at 1, but adjusting text-scaling-factor to e.g. 1.25 to give the best results. However, in Chromium, fonts rendered in the browser chrome (i.e. the tab, status bar, bookmarks pop up etc.) is distorted and with bad letter spacing. See screenshot: screenshot

Is there any way to improve this? Maybe this affects GTK or XWayland as a whole, rather than Chromium specifically? I've tried Chromium's --force-device-scale-factor=1 to no avail.

edit: fixed in Chromium v59 (and likely v58). Issue affected v57.

Last edited by tlvince (2017-03-18 20:25:07)

c00ter

Member

From: Alaskan in Washington State

Registered: 2014-08-28

Posts: 393

Re: [SOLVED] Distorted font rendering in Chromium tab bar/menus

From the number of similar posts here and in other boards, I would surmise it is a Wayland-created problem. The obvious question then is do you have these display problems using Xorg instead of Wayland? If Xorg clears up the problem, then that should be used. Wayland is not quite ready yet.

Regards

---

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

Gusar

Member

Registered: 2009-08-25

Posts: 3,605

Re: [SOLVED] Distorted font rendering in Chromium tab bar/menus

Try chromium-dev from AUR. Google has been futzing around a lot with how the interface is rendered, and I find that version 58 (where chromium-dev is currently) does a better job than version 57 (the current stable release).

tlvince

Member

Registered: 2010-07-06

Posts: 68

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Distorted font rendering in Chromium tab bar/menus

The obvious question then is do you have these display problems using Xorg instead of Wayland?

Unfortunately, yes; I can reproduce in Xorg.

Try chromium-dev from AUR.

I couldn't get chromium-dev to compile, but chromium-snapshot-bin (v59) somewhat surprisingly did fix the issue. Thanks!