Ubuntu – Ugly LibreOffice font

fontslibreoffice

I have been experiencing this super annoying bug with fonts in LibreOffice. Please see below screenshot. The spaces between letters are just messed, no matter what font or level of zoom I choose. When I change the zoom level, the spacing is actually changing but still looks very ugly.

I have a pretty much default instalation of Ubuntu. I installed a couple of fonts (droid, mscorefonts). I did not change any font settings.

LINK TO SCREENSHOT

Fonts in other applications looks great. When I open the very same text in Google Docs or MS Web Word, it looks perfect.

I would appreciate any help concerning this issue. Thanks!

Best Answer

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.

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