Ubuntu – How to fix TTF fonts’ ligatures (tt, ti, fi, ff, etc) in Firefox

firefoxfonts

With certain Windows fonts there is a display issue where ligature-kerning seems to flip out and make the two letters bold. Here's a screenshot of an email using Helvetica in Firefox:

enter image description here

As you can see, it seems to be something about the way crossed characters (t and f) connect to each other and letters like i.

I've had this problem for a very long time (over multiple systems) and wondered if anybody has ever seen similar issues popping up and found a way to fix them.

Note: I think this does just affect Firefox. Chrome and LibreOffice are both fine.

Best Answer

Another solution that will work with all applications, including Libre Office, is given by aldeby:

Edit or create the file ~/.fonts.conf and paste this code in it:

<match target="font" >
<edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>

Make sure to keep the XML structure.

Log out and in again, and Calibri (and possibly some other fonts) will look much better (actually even better than with the other answers given here, because the ugly bitmap substitutions are completely disabled).

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