Fonts not as good as Ubuntu, solution?

[frankwakeman]

With 9.04, the fonts clarity came on leaps and bounds, and became arguably better than Windows and Mac for one reason or another. That applied to Ubuntu and Gnome, but I'm now trying out Kubuntu and there the fonts are still at the 8.10 stage. Has anyone here sorted this out, or is there some .conf file to use, maybe amended from whatever was done in Ubuntu 9.04.

I'm referring specifically to the 'slight' anti-aliasing setting for LCD displays, as medium or full looks odd with fonts in Open Office especially.

Thanks in advance.

[Zorael]

I'm not sure I understand. Can't you set it to use slight hinting in system settings, too?

To cover other apps that don't listen to KDE's settings, you could create a ~/.fonts.conf file and specify slight hinting there.


<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
<const>rgb</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>hintslight</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

You can also make system-wide changes by removing/adding symlinks from /etc/fonts/conf.avail/ into /etc/fonts/conf.d/.

[frankwakeman]

Yes, I have 'slight' selected. But it is not as clear using Kubuntu or Mint 7 KDE as with Gnome Ubuntu. There are all those little colours in the fonts that with Gnome were a thing of the past after Ubuntu 8.10.

[Zorael]

Now do correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the colors suggest you have the "wrong" kind of supixel rendering enabled, in terms of what order the colors that make up each pixel is in. Is it set to RGB in both environments?

Again, beyond the settings you can touch in systemsettings there are those in /etc/fonts/conf.d/, of which user-specific changes should be saved in ~/.fonts.conf. Looking at the contents of a vanilla (Karmic) Kubuntu installation;

$ ls /etc/fonts/conf.d/
10-antialias.conf 40-nonlatin.conf 65-nonlatin.conf
10-hinting.conf 41-ttf-arphic-uming.conf 66-wqy-zenhei-sharp.conf
10-hinting-slight.conf 44-wqy-zenhei.conf 69-unifont.conf
11-lcd-filter-lcddefault.conf 45-latin.conf 70-no-bitmaps.conf
20-fix-globaladvance.conf 49-sansserif.conf 80-delicious.conf
20-unhint-small-vera.conf 50-user.conf 89-ttf-thai-tlwg-synthetic.conf
25-ttf-arphic-uming-render.conf 51-local.conf 90-synthetic.conf
30-cjk-aliases.conf 53-monospace-lcd-filter.conf 90-ttf-arphic-uming-embolden.conf
30-defoma.conf 60-latin.conf 99pdftoopvp.conf
30-metric-aliases.conf 64-ttf-arphic-uming.conf README
30-urw-aliases.conf 64-ttf-thai-tlwg.conf
35-ttf-arphic-uming-aliases.conf 65-fonts-persian.conf
All of those are my enabled settings. They're symlinks to available configuration files in /etc/fonts/conf.avail/;

$ ls /etc/fonts/conf.avail/
10-antialias.conf 29-language-selector-ko-kr.conf 66-wqy-zenhei-sharp.conf
10-autohint.conf 29-language-selector-zh.conf 66-wqy-zenhei-sharp-no13px.conf
10-hinting.conf 30-cjk-aliases.conf 69-language-selector-ja-jp.conf
10-hinting-full.conf 30-metric-aliases.conf 69-language-selector-ka-ge.conf
10-hinting-medium.conf 30-urw-aliases.conf 69-language-selector-ko-kr.conf
10-hinting-slight.conf 35-ttf-arphic-uming-aliases.conf 69-language-selector-zh-cn.conf
10-no-sub-pixel.conf 40-nonlatin.conf 69-language-selector-zh-hk.conf
10-sub-pixel-bgr.conf 41-ttf-arphic-uming.conf 69-language-selector-zh-mo.conf
10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf 44-wqy-zenhei.conf 69-language-selector-zh-sg.conf
10-sub-pixel-vbgr.conf 45-latin.conf 69-language-selector-zh-tw.conf
10-sub-pixel-vrgb.conf 49-sansserif.conf 69-unifont.conf
10-unhinted.conf 50-user.conf 70-no-bitmaps.conf
11-lcd-filter-lcddefault.conf 51-local.conf 70-yes-bitmaps.conf
20-fix-globaladvance.conf 53-monospace-lcd-filter.conf 80-delicious.conf
20-unhint-small-vera.conf 60-latin.conf 89-ttf-thai-tlwg-synthetic.conf
25-ttf-arphic-uming-bitmaps.conf 64-ttf-arphic-uming.conf 90-synthetic.conf
25-ttf-arphic-uming-nobitmaps.conf 64-ttf-thai-tlwg.conf 90-ttf-arphic-uming-embolden.conf
25-ttf-arphic-uming-render.conf 65-fonts-persian.conf 99-language-selector-zh.conf
25-unhint-nonlatin.conf 65-khmer.conf
29-language-selector-ja-jp.conf 65-nonlatin.conf
Now, looking at the contents of conf.d, admittedly on this Karmic machine, we see both 11-lcd-filter-lcddefault.conf and 53-monospace-lcd-filter.conf are enabled. Perhaps they could be the cause of what you're experiencing, and GNOME is simply bypassing them with its own settings, while KDE does not?

Since they're symlinks, you can freely delete the files in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ to disable settings, and freely make new symlinks of the files in conf.avail into conf.d. Might want to record what the defaults were.