Ubuntu – Ugly font rendering with Android Studio on Java8

android-studiofontsjava

I am using Oracle Java 8 and Android Studio, but it is difficult to work with it because of the ugly font rendering. Here are some screen-shots.

I am using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit. Android Studio is set to use the GTK Themes. I have also added the following options to andriod-studio/bin/studio64.vmoptions and android-studio/bin/studio64.vmoptions as described in this post on Super User.

-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on
-Dswing.aatext=true
-Dsun.java2d.xrender=true

Apart from the GTK theme settings in Android-Studio > Settings > Appearance, nothing else is done.

I am also not really happy with the overall fonts settings on my machine. Here is a screenshot of firefox:

I have only installed some powerline fonts in my ~/.fonts directory for my rxvt terminal. That's all.

Any pointers on how to go from here?

Best Answer

In the bundled JRE, there's a font configuration file which seems to default to full hinting.

To change this, open jre/lib/fonts/font.conf and locate the following part:

<edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
  <const>hintfull</const>
</edit>

There, replace hintfull with a different hintstyle, e.g. hintslight which is usually the default for other UIs in Ubuntu.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Ugly LibreOffice font

I answer this old thread because I experienced the same problem and I just solved it with a different method. I run Ubuntu 16.04 and LibreOffice 5.1.4.2.

Essentially, I took the answer proposed by Fitoschido in this thread: https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/7127/calibri-font-not-rendering-correctly/

In short, one has to edit (or create) ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf and add the following block:

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

This has the effect of bypassing the bitmaps of the characters embedded in MS fonts and getting Ubuntu/Linux to apply anti-aliasing as I should. Now, MS fonts look much, much better in LibreOffice.

Ubuntu – Android Studio doesn’t render Ubuntu Mono Font well

The problem is not anti-aliasing - all of your examples show the text is anti-aliased fine.

The difference is in an aspect of font rendering called "hinting" - the top Ubuntu Mono example shows a strong hinting, whereas the bottom Ubuntu Mono example shows a smoother hinting. Hinting deforms the letter shapes to better align to the pixel grid and give a more crisp appearance.

Whether you like one or the other is a matter of personal preference. The top one is certainly very clear to read but at the expense of deforming the letter shapes.

The Java environment will be using its own font renderer rather than your global settings, hence the difference.

There are various fixes for this described in this link at stackoverflow.com:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17510099/ugly-fonts-in-java-applications-on-ubuntu

This one looks pretty simple (I have not tested this):

Try adding

export _JAVA_OPTIONS='-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=gasp'

to your ~/.bashrc

But the chosen solution is more complex.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Ugly LibreOffice font

Ubuntu – Android Studio doesn’t render Ubuntu Mono Font well

Related Question