Ubuntu – Ubuntu 16.04 – How to override fonts

fontsgoogle-chrome

I recently installed Ubuntu 16.04, everything went nice and smooth except when I installed Chrome, and logged in to my account to check my watch history on YouTube, then I came across this weird looking font:

I checked with Inspect Element to see what font it was, turns out it was

font: 12px Roboto,arial,sans-serif;

Personally, I don't like it, though on Windows I like it.
Inspect Element's font is weird also.

Why are they different?
Can I change it, currently I'm using Open Sans as my main font.

Best Answer

The default fonts you're disatisfied with are those which are set within your browser, and overriding the system fonts may not be the best approach. If you are using Firefox there are font setting preferences, and if using Chromium you will need to install an extension. You can then preview and choose your preferred fonts in a more flexible way. To get the Microsoft default system fonts in Ubuntu, install the package ttf-mscorefonts-installer via your preferred method (ie apt in a terminal, synaptic, or otherwise) to get Arial. As an alternative to Arial, I also recommend the fonts-texgyre package, with TeX Gyre Heros as the best free Helvetica alternative (actually a highly developed and extended set of Nimbus, a grotesk which has a history prior to Helvetica).

More specific to your situation, the diagonal stroke thinning on the "S" and "s", as well as the compressed counters and narrowed aperture in "e", and too-low middle stroke of the "E" seems to indicate that you are using the infinality package. To my taste, this package is very unsuited to the default tweaks Ubuntu is already applying to the freedesktop font rendering, and much better for most other distros (like Fedora or OpenSUSE). Basically, it's correcting in addition to the corrections that are built into Ubuntu by default, rather than replacing them. I think the Ubuntu defaults are the best font rendering on any desktop operating system, but if you are a long-time Windows user they will look very different (much less strongly aliased). I recommend uninstalling infinality if you do have it on an Ubuntu installation, and if you want to try a tweak, use unity-tweak-tool to turn font hinting off completely (allowing the renderer to make all the decisions itself).

Some example screen shots of Youtube at different magnifications, in Chromium. Note that changing system hinting preferences in unity-tweak-tool (and logging out and back in to restart the session) did not change the rendering of these tiles in-browser.

Roboto (Youtube default, to compare with OP's screenshot):

Roboto (size decreased as a test of the compositor's aliasing capabilities):

Arial (as alternative font) this is with hinting turned off completely, RGBA aliasing. The font renders in a very crisp, MS way.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – override fonts installed by ttf-mscorefonts-installer, prefer Liberation fonts

fontconfig employs a complete set of font substitution systems. There are different levels of font definition: font name and font families. Given a specific font, fontconfig uses the font of the same name if available, then seeks otherwise the font family of the same name. If there is still no match, it uses the standard font family definition as substitution, i.e. Sans, Sans-serif and Mono.

Ubuntu has the font family 'Verdana' defined in `/etc/fonts/conf.d/45-latin.conf', where 'Verdana' is set default to 'Sans-serif', which means Sans-serif is employed for 'Verdana' by default. But 'Verdana.ttf' would be used instead if it's installed.

In your system, the preferred font in the Sans-serif family is 'Liberation Sans', so fontconfig uses the 'Liberation Sans' as substitution for 'Verdana' provided there is no font of the same name, whereas uses 'Verdana.ttf' if it's in the search path. This explains what you've posted.

So the solution to your problem is that, you have to remap the font 'Verdana' to a different font, or to a group of fonts which assigns to 'Liberation Sans' the highest priority. (The latter case is recommended)

Open or create the file ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf, append following:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>

<match>
    <test name="family"><string>Verdana</string></test>
    <edit name="family" mode="prepend" binding="strong">
        <string>Liberation Sans</string>
        <string>Verdana</string>
    </edit>
</match>

</fontconfig>

Note that ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated now, and if you already have user-defined fonts.conf, remove the header and footer and only keep the 'match' section. And it would be too long-winded to demonstrate the same workaround on 'Arial'. I'm sure you can find it on your own.

Ubuntu – Where on earth are the fonts? Firefox has nothing for “sans-serif”

If you know the name of any of the font packages you typically have installed, you can use the locate command:
locate fontName | less
or
locate fontName | grep -iv java | less
to filter out unwanted results.

If you do not know the font name, you will have to get your system back to a working state and then see if you can identify them. Either way, 'locate' will probably be able to show you where they are and if they move after your Clementine, etc. setups. For example, do you have much inside of /etc/fonts? Or /etc/X11/fonts?

UPDATE: Since the problem seems to be with the default sans-serif, do fc-match sans-serif to find out what your system wants to use and make sure that it is available.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – override fonts installed by ttf-mscorefonts-installer, prefer Liberation fonts

Ubuntu – Where on earth are the fonts? Firefox has nothing for “sans-serif”

Related Question