Arch Linux

ironhak

Member

Registered: 2025-08-10

Posts: 13

Weird font... unless I zoom

Hello everyone

I'm on i3wm. I noticed that with some fonts I get really bad render quality, one of them being Colibri.

Here's a couple of screenshots that reproduce the problem:

https://i.imgur.com/eehzZ8D.png
https://imgur.com/f5cQjWX.png
https://imgur.com/uGPOucw.png

This happens on LibreOffice Writer as you can see, but it also happens for example in the gmail website when I receive a mail that uses Calibri.

Can anyone help me to fix this? Thank's a lot

Mod edit: - Replaced oversized images with links

Last edited by V1del (2025-10-09 09:24:36)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,795

Re: Weird font... unless I zoom

Those are MS fonts that contain bitmaps that will get used at certain sizes if you have the ttf-ms-fonts packages. You can disable the display of embedded bitmaps as described in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Micros … tmap_fonts you might also instead want to consider installing the metric compatible ttf-carlito and adjusting the font config aliases (as described in same article) to make Calibri map there.

ironhak

Member

Registered: 2025-08-10

Posts: 13

Re: Weird font... unless I zoom

Those are MS fonts that contain bitmaps that will get used at certain sizes if you have the ttf-ms-fonts packages. You can disable the display of embedded bitmaps as described in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Micros … tmap_fonts you might also instead want to consider installing the metric compatible ttf-carlito and adjusting the font config aliases (as described in same article) to make Calibri map there.

Thanks! Yes I have the ms fonts package... But on other systems like Linux Mint when I isntall ms fonts I don't get that problem. Isn't there a ms.fonts package for arch where this issue is fixed by default?

ironhak

Member

Registered: 2025-08-10

Posts: 13

Re: Weird font... unless I zoom

Anyway, for anmyone reading in the future, creating this file

~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/20-no-embedded.conf

with content:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "urn:fontconfig:fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
      <bool>false</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

after a log-out worked good. The problem is vanished... I'm afraid this will cause problems with Emojis, but let's see.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,795

Re: Weird font... unless I zoom

The first line of the linked section is

Use the 70-no-bitmaps-except-emoji.conf preset to disable this behavior.

which allows you to disable bitmaps safe for emojis with a simple symlink.

In any case if you consider this [SOLVED] please mark it as such by editing the title in your original post.

ironhak

Member

Registered: 2025-08-10

Posts: 13

Re: Weird font... unless I zoom

The first line of the linked section is

Use the 70-no-bitmaps-except-emoji.conf preset to disable this behavior.

which allows you to disable bitmaps safe for emojis with a simple symlink.

In any case if you consider this [SOLVED] please mark it as such by editing the title in your original post.

So, I removed the file

~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/20-no-embedded.conf

to test this. And run the following command:

sudo ln -s /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps-except-emoji.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

Unfortunately the problem presented itself again, meaning that using the preset does not work as intented. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 69,051

Re: Weird font... unless I zoom

That configlet disables all fonts that are not tagged scalable or outline, ie. regular bitmap fonts, it will especially give fonts w/ embedded bitmaps a pass what upstream seems to equate w/ <swearing> emojis.
The reason behind that configlet was also to nuke bitmap fonts from high orbit because apparently people install them and are then irritated because they end up actually being used (sounds insane and is most likely because of questionable hard font dependencies across distros)

Either way https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Font_c … tmap_fonts is the correct approach to disable embedded bitmaps and optionially give selected fonts (sigh-mojis) a pass.

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V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,795

Re: Weird font... unless I zoom

Ah misread that