Ubuntu Fonts – Fix Bad Font Anti-Aliasing in Ubuntu

anti-aliasingfontconfigfontslinuxUbuntu

I'm switching from Fedora 8 to Ubuntu 9.04, and I can't seem to get it to get a good font anti-aliasing to work. It seems that Ubuntu's fontconfig tries to keep characters in integral pixel widths. This makes text more difficult to read, when 1 pixel is too thin and 2 pixels is too thick.

Check the image below. In Fedora, when fontconfig anti-aliasing is enabled, fonts have their thickness proportional to the font size. Below, the thickness is different for 8, 9 and 10pt sizes. In Ubuntu, on the other hand, even when anti-aliasing is enabled, all 8, 9 and 10pt sizes have 1 pixel thickness. This makes reading larges amount of text difficult.

Comparing Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 9.04 font anti-aliasing.

I'm using the very same home directory, and I already checked that X resources are the same in both systems:

~% xrdb -query | grep Xft
Xft.antialias:  1
Xft.dpi:        96
Xft.hinting:    1
Xft.hintstyle:  hintfull
Xft.rgba:       none

GNOME settings:

~% gconftool-2 -a /desktop/gnome/font_rendering
 antialiasing = grayscale
 hinting = full
 dpi = 96
 rgba_order = rgb

So, the question is: What should I change in the new box (Ubuntu) in order to get anti-aliasing like in the old box (Fedora)?

Best Answer

There is an old trick to make fonts smoother on Ubuntu (and pretty much every distro running Gnome):

Open up .fonts.conf under your home directory (~/.fonts.conf) and paste this in:

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

Before:

alt text

After:

alt text

Steps I took when last installing Ubuntu afresh

Put your TrueType fonts (.ttf files from Windows installation or e.g. the Microsoft Core Fonts package legally available on the web) in some directory, e.g. /usr/local/winfonts.

Edit /etc/fonts/local.config and add your winfont dir:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<!-- /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file to configure system font access -->
<fontconfig>
        <!-- Font directory list -->
        <dir>/usr/local/winfonts</dir> 
        <dir>/usr/share/X11/fonts/misc</dir>
</fontconfig>

Run sudo fc-cache -fv to rebuild font information cache files. (Nowadays there's no need to create files like fonts.scale, fonts.dir or fonts.alias using ttmkfdir or other utilities!)

Then configure Tahoma 8 as the default font in your desktop environment (KDE's control centre for me; equally easy in the Gnome equivalent)

And that's it.

Alternative way

Another way is to simply install msttcorefonts package from Universe and run fc-cache, as instructed in this post on Ubuntu Blog.

The core fonts package doesn't include Tahoma though. But if you have it from other sources, copying the .ttf files to ~/.fonts/ (or /usr/local/share/fonts for system wide availability) before running fc-cache should be sufficient.

Linux – Dethestifying Font Appearance on Linux : The Proper Way

/etc/fonts hold Xft settings, while .fonts.conf is a per-user override of /etc/fonts/*
DEs set their settings using X settings daemon (there are several of them, one in each DE, and also several standalone for use with lightweight WMs)
applications get settings either from Xft directly (/etc/fonts), or from X settings daemon if it is active.
some applications (e.g. Google Chrome) only get settings from X settings daemon. so the only way to get proper fonts in Chrome running under lightweight WM is to run some sort of xsettingsd
gtk and qt apps treat some of Xft settings differently, so it can be tricky to create fonts.conf that works in the same way in Qt and GTK.

and here's what i think, but didn't really check:

GDK/Pango uses Xft with its default settings, either from fonts.conf or X settings.
Qt adds extra tweaks to fonts.conf settings, which breaks some of the settings.
Cairo seems to respect xft settings, but rendering looks slightly differently compared to Pango.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Best Fonts for Ubuntu

Steps I took when last installing Ubuntu afresh

Alternative way

Linux – Dethestifying Font Appearance on Linux : The Proper Way

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