Debian Fonts – How to Improve Font Rendering in Firefox
debianfirefoxfonts
My font rendering in Firefox looks terrible on pages such as facebook.com and twitter.com:
I'm running Debian 8 and fiddling with hardware acceleration, and it doesn't seem to work.
Best Answer
I've had this issue for ages, maybe it's time to do something about it!
It comes done to ClearType, Microsoft and patents from what I read. Most *nix distro's disable any patent protected font rendering by default.
Read about Debian and fonts here, you want Subpixel-hinting and Font-smoothing section.
There's a config file on that page but I will add here for future reference. Create a file called .fonts.conf in your home directory, and add the following:
Before you do anything else, upgrade your Debian distribution to at least Squeeze. Squeeze has been the active stable tree for a long time now (and will likely be superseded by Wheezy sometime this year) and Lenny is more than a year past its end-of-life date.
What that means is that not only is all of its software dangerously outdated, it hasn't been receiving security updates for at least that long.
If that doesn't solve your problem outright (Ubuntu tends to be a bit ahead of Debian stable because it's much less rigorous about what they consider acceptable for a stable release) I'd still recommend you look at Debian backports before you start trying to graft ubuntu packages onto a debian system, especially where libraries are concerned.
Best Answer
I've had this issue for ages, maybe it's time to do something about it!
It comes done to
ClearType
, Microsoft and patents from what I read. Most *nix distro's disable any patent protected font rendering by default.Read about Debian and fonts here, you want
Subpixel-hinting and Font-smoothing
section.There's a config file on that page but I will add here for future reference. Create a file called
.fonts.conf
in your home directory, and add the following: