HOWTO: Make your fonts smooth enough to drool over.

[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.


Edit: Oops, typo.

[az]

Can't you set your fonts with the desktop configuration utility? Fonts- Advanced...

[zenwhen]

Yes, but auto hinting is not configurable with that utility. This is something you have to do manually until the gnome devs drop it into that tool.

[stodge]

Is this a GNOME only thing, or for Ubuntu in general? I.e. will it work for KDE?

[HungSquirrel]

I see no difference.

Edit: But when I moved it to .fonts.conf I did. *_*

[dle]

Is this a GNOME only thing, or for Ubuntu in general? I.e. will it work for KDE?

It will apply to KDE too. It won't apply to apps that use older toolkits, like nedit or xpdf.

[Raeth]

Yes, but auto hinting is not configurable with that utility. This is something you have to do manually until the gnome devs drop it into that tool.

You can make a compromise and run 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig'.

[garba]

this trick is a god-send, thanks, but why on earth isn't this autohint thingie enabled by default? so far everybody seems to have been extremely happy with this tweak... besides, I would reccomend saving the contents of that file to /etc/fonts/local.conf to get autohinting even in kdm.

besides, thanks again!

[markus79]

Wow!

[kidrich]

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.

This may not be necessary -- A quick look at my Hoary box shows auto hinting is already enabled by default globally (for all users) in /etc/fonts/local.conf.