HOWTO: Make your fonts smooth enough to drool over.

[Jeffredo]

This looks very much like the Clear Type font enabling used in XP (which helps a great deal). They do add a tiny bit of green around some letters at certain angles on my LCD set to 1280x1024, but as another poster said, it does take care of the "faded out" letters "x", "k", etc... I can deal with a slight greenish hint for that! Good job!

[cdhotfire]

wow, this almost made me pee myself when i did it. =D> , good work.

[Kirin]

Yes! This looks like it might be what I need to get me using Ubuntu full-time. I'm currently using a G3 iMac, which while nice is quite slooow, and I've been donated a faster PC. I liked all of Ubuntu apart from the fonts (OS X has got me used to heavily anti-aliased fonts). If this looks okay (and I couldn't tell the difference between the fonts in the screenshots and those surrounding them being rendered by OS X) then it may be OSS for me! Yay!

[napsy]

I copied fonts.txt to ~/.fonts.conf but none has changed. The font look is the same; bold. Must I install some specific packages?

Sample:

[napsy]

Got it. Just reconfigured fontconfig and that was it.

[foobar]

Got it. Just reconfigured fontconfig and that was it.

what did you do to the fontconfig?

[Buffalo Soldier]

I don't know what napsy did to fontconfig. But what I did was, I run terminal and

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

and enable the autohinter.

[jsgotangco]

WOW my fonts look so sharp now - it complements Clearlooks. I've never seen fonts so clear in Gnome.

[cmsj]

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

[bored2k]

Hmm, I always thought that the default fonts with ubuntu were already very good. Haven't tried this out yet, but I don't see how it can improve. Then again, I've been using Linux for a good 3 years, and remember the times when fonts were **really****really***really bad.

Can someone post a before-after photo?

there are just 2 many dif. aspects, it looks like they look a lil smaller, but theyre not. Ported M$ fonts look a LOT better, and it overall looks great [works great with msttcorefonts] .