Ubuntu – Fuzzy text in Unity title bar

12.04fontsunity

Since upgrading to precise, the text in the Unity title bar is fuzzy. I thought this might be my general font settings, but Window titles, which seem to use the exact same font, don't have this problem at all. Here's a screenshot, showing the Unity title bar just above a window title bar showing the same text:

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If you zoom in, you can see a green shadow effect in the Unity title bar text.

Best Answer

This problem is likely to be this launchpad bug which is specific to using the theme Radiance in Unity-2D.

If it is then there is a workaround you can try.

Some before and after screen-shots will help here with this method:

before

enter image description here

after

enter image description here

how did I do that

Themes are described in text files in the folder /usr/share/themes. Specifically themes use what is termed Content Style Sheets to define what they should look like.

Since these are text files - you can edit and change these easily.

First you have a choice - you can edit the files directly - or via a copy in your own home folder.

If you edit the files directly, then an update to the theme will overwrite all of your good work ... but then again - it may be the update you are looking for.

Lets assume you want a user specific theme. The following commands copies the Radiance theme into your home folder.

Lets open a terminal and copy and paste the following:

mkdir -p ~/.themes
cp -r /usr/share/themes/Radiance ~/.themes
gedit ~/.themes/Radiance/gtk-3.0/apps/unity.css

What you want to edit is in this section of the file:

enter image description here

You need to add text-shadow: none; to this section (i.e. between the { and } curly brackets) so that it now looks like:

enter image description here

Logout and login to see the change take effect.