Fonts rendering sucks

brainwasher · 2007-01-04 21:39:39

Hi all, i notice that my font rendering sucks a lot, what can i do for improve font rendering ?? :oops:

Gullible Jones · 2007-01-04 21:51:12

There are different ways that font rendering can suck... Mind describing it, or posting a screenshot?

waluigi · 2007-01-04 22:27:08

I have ugly fonts in Arch too.
In Gentoo Linux I have those fonts
http://waluigi.pl/files/gentoo-fonts.png
and in Arch
http://waluigi.pl/files/fonts-arch.png

I made beauty fonts in Gentoo with this howto
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-511382.html
maybe somebody can made hacked PKGBUILDs for freetype, cairo and libXft like this from Gentoo ebuilds?

Cheers

brainwasher · 2007-01-04 22:37:47

waluigi wrote:

maybe somebody can made hacked PKGBUILDs for freetype, cairo and libXft like this from Gentoo ebuilds?
Cheers

How ??

@ Gullible Jones
Screenshot

timtux · 2007-01-04 22:57:27

brainwasher wrote:

hey, what gtk theme is that?

brainwasher · 2007-01-04 22:59:21

timtux wrote:

brainwasher wrote:
hey, what gtk theme is that?

gray-flat

phrakture · 2007-01-04 23:01:04

waluigi wrote:

I have ugly fonts in Arch too.
In Gentoo Linux I have those fonts
http://waluigi.pl/files/gentoo-fonts.png
and in Arch
http://waluigi.pl/files/fonts-arch.png

I see _very_ little difference in those two. It looks like this is yet another "bytecode interpreter vs auto-hinting"

yankees26 · 2007-01-04 23:03:17

I wouldn't say either suck....but have you considered fiddling with Firefox's font settings. And for terminal stuff take a look at ~/.Xdefaults. For gtk stuff look in ~/.gtkrc-2.0 and/or ~/.gtk.mine.

timtux · 2007-01-05 04:43:28

phrakture wrote:

waluigi wrote:
I have ugly fonts in Arch too.
In Gentoo Linux I have those fonts
http://waluigi.pl/files/gentoo-fonts.png
and in Arch
http://waluigi.pl/files/fonts-arch.png
I see _very_ little difference in those two. It looks like this is yet another "bytecode interpreter vs auto-hinting"

i dont see any diffrence at all

manmower · 2007-01-05 07:50:43

brainwasher: I don't know which WM/DE you use but for me fonts look like your screenshot when I set font hinting to "Full" (happens in Xfce, Gnome and KDE) and I fix it by setting hinting to "Slight".

RedShift · 2007-01-05 08:07:36

IMHO, the arch fonts look better.

If you really want to chance it back to gentoo's, enable sub-pixel rendering. (Or sub-pixel hinting, or whatever they call it these days)

brainwasher · 2007-01-05 10:24:09

i resolve, is only a firefox problem....
so, thank you

Basu · 2007-01-05 10:40:05

seems to me like a lot of people are having font problems lately (myself included). I hope this isn't a sign of something wrong 'deeper down'.

cdhotfire · 2007-01-05 12:10:51

Basu wrote:

seems to me like a lot of people are having font problems lately (myself included). I hope this isn't a sign of something wrong 'deeper down'.

No, this so called "font problem" has been going around for a LONG time.

RedShift · 2007-01-05 12:19:31

Basu wrote:

seems to me like a lot of people are having font problems lately (myself included). I hope this isn't a sign of something wrong 'deeper down'.

What kind of font problems? Maybe we should put this all together and create a wiki page to solve most common font problems.

brainwasher · 2007-01-05 12:28:11

RedShift wrote:

Basu wrote:
seems to me like a lot of people are having font problems lately (myself included). I hope this isn't a sign of something wrong 'deeper down'.
What kind of font problems? Maybe we should put this all together and create a wiki page to solve most common font problems.

maybe yes

lanrat · 2007-01-05 12:46:34

phrakture wrote:

waluigi wrote:
I have ugly fonts in Arch too.
In Gentoo Linux I have those fonts
http://waluigi.pl/files/gentoo-fonts.png
and in Arch
http://waluigi.pl/files/fonts-arch.png
I see _very_ little difference in those two. It looks like this is yet another "bytecode interpreter vs auto-hinting"

I'm not sure if one of them is BCI. To me they are both with autohinter on but different settings.

Anyway, I made some tests with different configs in this thread.

Be careful with "overwriting" config options from /etc/fonts by home dir config file. For this reason I'm using only my local.config file with only a few basic symlinks from the standard fontconfig package configuration and disabled user settings. This way I'm (pretty) sure nothing else than my own local.conf affects fontconfig. So far it survived last 3 or 4 fontconfig upgrades with no changes on font rendering :-)

BTW: still after each fontconfig upgrade it recreates all symlinks from initial configuration and I have to configure them again.
I requested bug report reopening but no response so far...

Snarkout · 2007-01-05 14:01:06

My Arch fonts look way better now than they did a year ago, even with no intervention from me. To me, at least, it seems like there has been a lot of work put towards improving fonts. Not sure if this is Arch devs doing this or this is coming from upstream, but either way it's appreciated. By me at least.

hjorthboggild · 2007-01-05 14:51:32

In my opinion the real issue is with how fonts are antialiased at small sizes. If you're a fan of ClearType (which I am) antialiasing in Linux is just too fuzzy (at small sizes). Until either freetype or Cairo/libxft implements better antialiasing I won't be contended with the way fonts are rendered on my lcd screen. Font rendering seems to be very subjective, people have very different opinions on what looks good or not, and for some people it doesn't make any difference how fonts are rendered. My own personal reference point is ClearType, and until now I haven't seen anything in Linux come close to that, unfortunately. How many people agree with me, I don't know

Regards,
Simon

manmower · 2007-01-22 01:01:58

For all the LCD owners disappointed in font rendering:

I bought an LCD yesterday (my first) and was appalled at the quality of fonts. At first I thought it had to do with my weird DPI (it's a 20" 4:3 at 1400x1050 = ~87dpi). But I just found a satisfactory solution.

Search the AUR for 'cleartype', and you'll see patched versions of cairo, libxft and freetype2. These really made my day as my fonts are looking better than ever. I don't know if they will make an equally big difference for people running more conventional resolutions/dpi, but in my case it was night and day.

Gullible Jones · 2007-01-22 03:30:13

brainwasher wrote:

waluigi wrote:
maybe somebody can made hacked PKGBUILDs for freetype, cairo and libXft like this from Gentoo ebuilds?
Cheers

How ??
@ Gullible Jones
Screenshot
[URL=http://img247.imageshack.us/my.php?image=schermatagooglebonechoeu1.png][/URL]

Hmm. Is your problem with the aliased on the Google page?

(BTW, Firefox 2.x might have something to do with this, I've heard that it does odd things with font rendering.)

murpheus40 · 2007-01-25 00:06:23

manmower wrote:

For all the LCD owners disappointed in font rendering:
I bought an LCD yesterday (my first) and was appalled at the quality of fonts. At first I thought it had to do with my weird DPI (it's a 20" 4:3 at 1400x1050 = ~87dpi). But I just found a satisfactory solution.
Search the AUR for 'cleartype', and you'll see patched versions of cairo, libxft and freetype2. These really made my day as my fonts are looking better than ever. I don't know if they will make an equally big difference for people running more conventional resolutions/dpi, but in my case it was night and day.

How can I install those patched versions? If I try

pacman -U freetype2-cleartype-2.2.1-4.pkg.tar.gz

I got dependencies errors:

[root@myhost freetype2-cleartype]# pacman -U freetype2-cleartype-2.2.1-4.pkg.tar.gz
loading package data... done.
:: freetype2-cleartype conflicts with freetype2. Remove freetype2? [Y/n] 
error: this will break the following dependencies:
  freetype2: is required by libxfont
  freetype2: is required by fontconfig

upgrade aborted.

Thanks for your help

manmower · 2007-01-25 08:02:20

pacman -Udf

did the trick for me. Watch out with the cairo package though, make sure to use the 1.2.6 source to match the current cairo version in Arch or it will not work.

murpheus40 · 2007-01-25 23:52:50

manmower wrote:

pacman -Udf
did the trick for me. Watch out with the cairo package though, make sure to use the 1.2.6 source to match the current cairo version in Arch or it will not work.

Ok, thanks. Well, I didnt see any difference after restarting X.
I thought the result will be like this one on Ubuntu forum: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread. … t=subpixel

On my Ubuntu machine, I can *really* see the difference after applying the patches.
Maybe I forgot something?

manmower · 2007-01-26 08:17:51

Okay,

- did you make sure you applied all three patches (freetype, xft, cairo)? Did you change cairo's pkgver to 1.2.6? (That's what I did and it worked for me, not sure if this is the recommended way though.)

- Could you post the contents of your .fonts.conf?

Arch Linux

#1 2007-01-04 21:39:39

Fonts rendering sucks

#2 2007-01-04 21:51:12

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#3 2007-01-04 22:27:08

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#4 2007-01-04 22:37:47

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#5 2007-01-04 22:57:27

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#6 2007-01-04 22:59:21

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#7 2007-01-04 23:01:04

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#8 2007-01-04 23:03:17

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#9 2007-01-05 04:43:28

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#10 2007-01-05 07:50:43

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#11 2007-01-05 08:07:36

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#12 2007-01-05 10:24:09

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#13 2007-01-05 10:40:05

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#14 2007-01-05 12:10:51

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#15 2007-01-05 12:19:31

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#16 2007-01-05 12:28:11

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#17 2007-01-05 12:46:34

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#18 2007-01-05 14:01:06

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#19 2007-01-05 14:51:32

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#20 2007-01-22 01:01:58

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#21 2007-01-22 03:30:13

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#22 2007-01-25 00:06:23

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#23 2007-01-25 08:02:20

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#24 2007-01-25 23:52:50

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

#25 2007-01-26 08:17:51

Re: Fonts rendering sucks

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