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b9anders

Member

Registered: 2007-11-07

Posts: 691

[RESOLVED] Ugly font in cases on HidPi display

I have a 3200x1800 display (Dell XPS 13) and have always had issues with some font rendering. Most of it looks fine and is crisp and properly scaled. but some ends up looking very narrow and bolded, with bad spacing.

For example, take a look at the difference in an editable pdf field in Okular:

Non-edit rendern (bad font):

in editing mode:

This also happens in some places in the browser:

Forum text looking as it should

another forum where text does not look as it should

If I compare the same website or pdf on a different machine, the font looks just fine.

I've tried changing my DPI to a multiple of 96, I've tried changing fonts in KDE and gtk, but nothing works. I would love some suggestions on what is causing this

Last edited by b9anders (2018-03-09 14:07:58)

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 78,021

Re: [RESOLVED] Ugly font in cases on HidPi display

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=233470
Please read the forum rules and replace the oversized images. Thanks.

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b9anders

Member

Registered: 2007-11-07

Posts: 691

Re: [RESOLVED] Ugly font in cases on HidPi display

Updating this for others who may experience the same issue now that I figured it out:

This actually was a result of having the Helvetica font installed. Apparently, once it's there it is quite hard to opt out of your browser and pdf viewer using it and its lousy rendering, even though I nowhere had it specified to use it.