Linux – How to disable google chrome’s terrible sub-pixel anti-aliasing in PDFs

anti-aliasingfontsgoogle-chromelinuxpdf

I'd just like to turn it off, because it's quite distracting when every PDF looks so colourful. I've looked through chrome://flags and there's an LCD text anti-aliasing option but it doesn't seem to affect the PDF viewer.

Here's how chrome Version 43.0.2357.125 (64-bit) on Fedora 21 renders this PDF for me:
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A little closer:

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Quite different to an old version of adobe reader with only slight colouring:

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And evince with no sub-pixel antialiasing:

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This is what my monitor looks like up close:

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From: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/subpixel.php

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Which looks much better than chrome's PDF viewer.

Update: Still an issue in Fedora 23, chrome 48.0.2564.103.

Best Answer

You can fix your font rendering issues in the PDF viewer by installing freetype-world, since you're on Fedora (according to this bug report: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=479400).

I'm still trying to figure out how to disable subpixel rendering in the PDF viewer on CentOS (which doesn't have a freetype-world package). So far I've tried editing ~/.fonts.conf and ~/.Xresources, and changing the Gnome system settings (based on the instructions here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=408079#c4).