HOWTO: Make your fonts smooth enough to drool over.

[guevara]

Will this make the fonts look better on Hardy too? My fonts seem okay, but I'm not quite drooling.

yep, i tried it on Hardy. Working so good.

[hannah187]

So I did on my Hardy as well. Perfect..thanks for this hack

[QwUo173Hy]

...this is indeed a very nice option; however fonts will get a bit blurrier. but the correct scaling compensates for that

Hi ale, I'm finding the fonts a bit smudged looking too. What do you mean by scaling?

[K.Morgan]

Not sure how everybody seems to be getting clear fonts, but I've done everything in this thread and nothing changed, still got blurry fonts.

Kristian

[fooman]

Not sure how everybody seems to be getting clear fonts, but I've done everything in this thread and nothing changed, still got blurry fonts.

Kristian

this post works best for me (yes, i'm using hardy)....

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...&postcount=172

[ujwal10101]

People have been saying that you can do the same thing (I'm on Hardy) from System->Preferences->Appearance, Fonts tab. I tried it out myself and found out it does work but it doesn't seem to make the changes globally/system-wide (I think it only works for the default GNOME apps like Rhythmbox, Nautilus etc.).

For e.g. the tool bars in Firefox looked awesome but the text of the web pages looked horrible.
The .fonts.conf seems to make them beautiful in every app (and all components).

I would appreciate it if anyone could test if my hunch is correct.

[L815]

I didn't think this would make much of a difference, but decided to give it a try.

I must say, NICE JOB
It has made my browser fonts much more readable and doesn't make some fonts huge compared to previous settings.

One bad thing I noticed is the mini i when bolded at a certain font size is hard to distinguish between an l.

[tobiasly]

The preferred way to do this on gutsy is:

sudo ln -sf /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-autohint.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

Yes yes yes yes!! THANK YOU! OMG I have spent SO long trying to get my fonts to not be ugly as sin on my 21" LCD at 1680x1050. I'm using Hardy 8.04 and I've spent hours switching out every different combination of font sizes, msttcorefonts, liberation fonts, gsfonts, subpixel smoothing, full/slight/no hinting, fc-config -f -v, restarting X, rebooting, EVERYTHING, and none of it worked until this!

For those who think you can get the same effect by going to Advanced under Font Settings, you can't! This is different from selecting Full Hinting or Subpixel Rendering, because I had tried them ALL before!

So now my only question is: why in the world is this so hard to find, and why isn't it on by default?! It's crap like this that perpetuates the perception that Linux is only for power users because you have to use the command line for too much. Mr. Shuttleworth, you said Ubuntu's goal is to be prettier than Apple's OSX, well this thread should be a testament to you: making fonts look awesome out of the box is very important for a lot of people, and hopefully it gets better sooner rather than later!

Thanks again for the original poster and for # 172 who showed how to do it the "right" way by simlinking into /etc/fonts/conf.d. I'd click Thanks for both of you but I guess your post is too old to enable it.

[tom957]

man, this looks good!

The preferred way to do this on gutsy is:

sudo ln -sf /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-autohint.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

[Cool Surfer]

where is the home directory pl and how do I rename it.