HOWTO: Make your fonts smooth enough to drool over.

[episodic]

Thanks - after reading various schemes for over an hour, I found this simple tweak!

This works feisty users! - and well.

LCD users may get even better results if you use the following code in your .fonts.conf file. This may work for CRT users as well, but I cannot confirm since I have only used this on my laptop.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">

<!-- the cathectic LCD tweaks, from linuxquestions.org,
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?postid=1361098#post1361098
-->

<fontconfig>

<!-- Disable sub-pixel rendering. X detects it anyway, and if you set
this as well, it just looks really horrible  -->
<match target="font" >
 <edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
  <const>none</const>
 </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font" >
 <edit mode="assign" name="hinting">
  <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font" >
 <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
  <const>hintfull</const>
 </edit>
 </match>

<!-- The first part of the 'magic.' This makes the fonts start to look
nice, but some of the shapes will be distorted, so hinting is needed
still -->
 <match target="font" >
 <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
  <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
 </match>

<!-- Autohinter is not turned on automatically. Only disable this if
you have recompiled Freetype with the bytecode interpreter, which is
run automatically. Although to be honest, Freetype are right, there
isn't much difference between the two. Note that OpenOffice is built
against the bytecode interpreter, so even if you have compiled it and
override it with the autohinter, OOo will still use the bytecode
interpreter -->
 <match target="pattern" >
 <edit mode="assign" name="autohint">
  <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
 </match>

<!-- Helvetica is a non true type font, and will look bad. This
replaces it with whatever is the default sans-serif font -->
 <match target="pattern" name="family" >
 <test name="family" qual="any" >
  <string>Helvetica</string>
 </test>
 <edit mode="assign" name="family" >
  <string>sans-serif</string>
 </edit>
 </match>
 <dir>~/.fonts</dir>
</fontconfig>

I found this hack here[michael-and-mary.net], who in turn found it from it's original creator here[linuxquestions.org].

[goodtimetribe]

This worked great for me. Thanks!

[anselm]

worked for me also

[mechanic]

So can someone explain how, after several versions of Ubuntu, these settings aren't built in or accessible from the System menu?

Regds, m.

[md5hash]

thanks alot, really cool

[Lucifiel]

Something else worth checking is that Gnome is feeding freetype the correct DPI. I'm sure it used to guess this, but both my hoary boxes were wrong when I checked just now.

Firstly, open a terminal and run:

xdpyinfo | grep dots

and you should see something like this:

-(cmsj@tenshu)-(~)- xdpyinfo | grep dots
resolution: 112x112 dots per inch

Now fire up Gnome's font preferences and click the Details button, set the DPI value in there to, in this case, 112. I'm not 100% sure what you do when your display has unequal horizontal and vertical DPIs, which does seem to happen, but I usually pick a value somewhere in the middle.
In my case Gnome on both machines was at 96, so setting it to 112 makes font sizes larger. You can tweak these down to the same sizes you had before, but in theory it should be rendering them better at that size. Combine that with the autohinting and you should have some very pretty fonts

That's a really interesting tip!!

Hmmm... when I set my DPI at 112, the font became really large but very blurry. Thus, I'd recommend that everyone pick a value slightly lower like 105.

Note: after I adjusted my DPI to 105, the fonts on my desktop like sda2 , hdc3, etc. became a lot clearer.

Oh and speaking of desktop fonts, does anyone know how to make all desktop icons display the font in black with the drop-down effects turned off?

[Kobalt]

Man this little piece of .conf is just awsome... Thanks a bunch zenwhen !

[stchman]

Give your Ubuntu that XP look with fonts:

http://www.stchman.com/ms_fonts.html

This works like a charm.

[dbbolton]

simply awesome.

[ahawks]

What's amazing is this thread was started in 2004, and today in May 2007 people are still posting "awesome!", and it's still not a feature of gnome-font-properties.

I just copied-pasted the xml into my existing .fonts.conf and it does indeed look sweet.

A note though: I only see a difference above a certain font size. For example, using Bitstream Vera Sans Roman, the text looks normal at 10pt, but super smooth at 11pt and above.