HOWTO: Hoary ClearType-like fonts

[Roman2K]

Perfect HowTo, thank you a lot !

[Graben]

Wow, I was really doubtful about this and figured my fonts were great. Was I ever wrong, you can't realize how fuzzy the fonts are until you do this. I now use 10 point fonts instead of 12 in firefox because they are actually legible! I do have to add one point, times new roman is the ugliest font i've ever seen. I much prefer bitstream vera sans mono

Edit: Okay I've come to the conclusion that the bitstream all look better to my eyes, that being said I am still disabling hinting at resolutions below 12 point. This is actually a bigger improvement for crappier fonts. My reading up on the interpreter states that hinting does not look good on smaller fonts that do not have the information enclosed in them, and that most DO NOT have it.

[J. S. Jackson]

Wow, I was really doubtful about this and figured my fonts were great. Was I ever wrong, you can't realize how fuzzy the fonts are until you do this. I now use 10 point fonts instead of 12 in firefox because they are actually legible! I do have to add one point, times new roman is the ugliest font i've ever seen. I much prefer bitstream vera sans mono

Edit: Okay I've come to the conclusion that the bitstream all look better to my eyes, that being said I am still disabling hinting at resolutions below 12 point. This is actually a bigger improvement for crappier fonts. My reading up on the interpreter states that hinting does not look good on smaller fonts that do not have the information enclosed in them, and that most DO NOT have it.

Most serif fonts (e.g. times new roman) do not look good on a computer display. They are more appropriate for printing. Sans serif fonts always look better on a monitor.

In my opinion, Verdana is probably the best font at small sizes, on a computer monitor. It was designed for that exact purpose.

[23meg]

right, but linux just won't render anti-aliased Verdana at smaller than 11 pixels size properly. in fact anything below 11 pixels looks so bad, and using anything bigger than 11 defeats the whole purpose of using a high resolution display.

[23meg]

i've found a screenshot that exactly illustrates the way i want my fonts. it's nice seeing that this can somehow be accomplished in linux! (sad that it's a Gentoo screenshot )

here we go:

http://gnome-look.org/content/previe...me=gPerfection

needless to say, i'll very much appreciate any hints to get such small fonts looking so good in Ubuntu.

[addikt]

ok used this guide for my LCD display and the fonts, although they look similar to clear type on xp, are just too fuzy to be called good... infact, I liked the default ubuntu font rendering compared to this fuzziness ... is there a way I can fix this problem or a way to go back to the original font setup I had with Ubuntu Hoary ? this guide should really have a way of undoing the operations ...

[23meg]

you should back up the originals every time you make important changes to your config files, and take notes of each action, so that you can undo it if needed.

in my first crusade of applying every tweak i saw on every forum on top of every other one in the hope of getting my fonts the way i've shown on my last post (and i still haven't!), i messed things up so bad that a reinstall was the easiest way to fix things. sorry for you if this is your situation as well

[addikt]

actually I was able to undo the changes myself ... I'm lazy so I just wanted a quick fix but changing things back to what they were wasn't difficult .. however, I am very dissappointed. This is the 4th or 5th guide I have tried hoping to make my fonts look better but none of them have worked out for me. It apparantly works for some people but doesn't for me (and no my eyes aren't screwed up and I followed the steps properly .. I don't wear glasses) ... so I'm gona have to go back to windows xp wth cleartype ... it's just not worth screwing up my eyes over Ubuntu's fonts even though they are a heck lot better than most linux distros out of the box, not to mention Ubuntu's awesome speed, stability and ease of use ... but if I can't read things easily then it's useless ... feels like **** because Ubuntu is everything I want in an operating system except for the damn fonts....

[23meg]

i hear you. did you look at the screenshot i linked above? liked it?

[jodef]

I must say this little discussion was interesting and informative I never realised recent versions of linux had font problems. I remeber about 3 or 4 years ago I stopped used linux because of horrible fonts/font rendering but up to a year ago when I started back using linux I've had no problems whatsoever. I have never had to adjust a single thing in the over 30 or 40 installs I've done, save maybe screen resolution.

I can however understand how pissed one can get with problematic fonts....