HOWTO: Make your fonts smooth enough to drool over.

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Originally Posted by zenwhen

Drop this file in your home directory renamed to ".fonts.conf" and log out and in again. It turns on auto hinting and makes your fonts sexy smooth. :grin:


Edit: Oops, typo.

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Thanks for the great tip.

They're definitely a great deal smoother, but I don't know if I'm going to lose any bodily fluids over it :-P

Thanks all the same. This... might fix my headaches. We'll see.
- Kev

http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/30/69049.gif
from here (more samples on that and the previous page): http://typophile.com/node/9982?from=...ts_per_page=50

I myself have 1680x1050 which translates to 129dpi, and I must say on my screen it looks stunning.
CT rendering is a well researched complicated hinting technology, that is not easy to get right. Improving readability is one of MS's prime goals for their next release, and they invested a lot into CT hinted fonts and rendering algos (which have to be adapted to each other). I fear the only thing I envy from them is font rendering. Saldy, that it is one of the most important things that OSes have to do well. IMO.

Well, I must say that this is the first time that fonts have looked normal in web pages. The verticals used to almost fade out, like | would almost not appear to be a solid line.

thanks!!!

As good as the first time I did this on Warty :).

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Originally Posted by foobar

i put and renamed the file in the home dir, restarted x but, nothing changed... what else do i need to do?

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I clicked on the download link, and when asked, had it open in a text editor. I then saved it in home as .fonts.conf and it looks great.

...and talking of font rendering, how does one get freetype2 onto the system? That promises rendering of MS-Cleartype standard.

m.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mechanic

...and talking of font rendering, how does one get freetype2 onto the system? That promises rendering of MS-Cleartype standard.

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Following the shouts of "RTFM, mechanic, you lazy ***!" I see there is a library for FT2 installed in Breezy, and reading the FAQ in /usr/share/doc/libfreetype6/ft2faq.html I see (I think!) that we would expect programmers to include this stuff in their progs at compile time. So why is font rendering so poor? Is it just particular progs ( and perhaps particular fonts) that work properly? Is there a tuning tool like the MSFT clear-type one - which works superbly? Are we just waiting for the Ubuntu programmers to catch up with this stuff?

m.

The font rendering in breezy is oustanding

hey thanks for the .font file it works great. I can see the difference