One more time with ugly fonts.

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

I'm getting tired of playing games with X.org. I cannot seem to turn on the autohinter. It was working and now it's not. I've tried recompiling freetype both manually (with and without the bytecode interpreter and unpatended autohinter) and using portage with and without the bindist flag. No changes. I have tried turning autohinting on and off in /etc/fonts/local.conf. No changes. I tried doing the same with ~/.fonts.conf. No changes. I did the same stuff earlier to try to turn it off to see if it would help my fonts and it didn't work then either. Recompiling the X server somehow made it switch off, but now it won't switch back on again. This is yet another example of random and inexplicable behavior that is common with trying to configure and maintain an X server. Yet many people will say that this is easier and more logical (!) than Windows. Apparently, the last Windows these people used was Windows 2.0.

In any case, I have followed the X.org and Fonts wiki entry about 20 times. Turning on medium hinting makes fonts uglier than without it, but in either case, the fonts are just plain ugly. Take a look at a current snapshot of a webpage in Konqueror and a Konsole session (without medium hinting):

http://www.unc.edu/~feiner/konqueror-ugly.png
http://www.unc.edu/~feiner/konsole1-ugly.png

I turn on medium hinting and Konqueror looks slightly better, but Konsole looks absolutely awful:

http://www.unc.edu/~feiner/konqueror2-ugly.png
http://www.unc.edu/~feiner/konsole2-ugly.png

I'm really at my wit's end. Does everybody else have ugly fonts? I've seen screenshots of people's Linux desktops without ugly fonts, so I assume it is possible. But I've tried pretty much everything and the best I can get is some compromise that isn't unbearable, but isn't great either.

troinfo · n00b Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 72 Location: New York

Try this:

Goto Control Panel -> Appearance & Themes -> Fonts

Put in these values:

General: Arial 12
Fixed width Courier New 10
Toolbar: Arial 12
Menu: Arial 12
Window title: 12
Taskbar: Arial 11
Deskktop: helvetica 12

Put an "X" in the checkbox for anti-aliasing of fonts

For your browser if your are using Firefox set mimimum font size to 10 or 12

and use helvetica for the ones you can and serif for the one you can use helvetica.

Hope this helps

troinfo

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

I have DPI set to 96 so Arial 12 is huge. But Arial is worse than Bitstream Vera Sans, which is now the only tolerable font.

Anti-aliasing is obviously enabled, as is sub-pixel rendering (though sub-pixel rendering seems to make no difference whatsoever).

Here's another screenshot showing how absolutely ugly some of the fonts are: www.unc.edu/~feiner/konqueror3-ugly.png

That's unnacceptable.

southsider · Guru Joined: 05 Jul 2004 Posts: 358

WTF? Unhinted looks absolutely spot on.

I know this post isn't much use to you but to call that ugly is out of line! OS X uses unhinted fonts and they look swell.

Reason being is that they retain their vector shapes, as opposed to being distorted to snap to pixels.

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

southsider · Guru Joined: 05 Jul 2004 Posts: 358

I use an iiyama LCD panel with a gamma curve of ~1.8. Dunno if you might want to adjust your curve to see if it makes it look any nicer. I know if you use something darker they tend to look more blotchy.

southsider · Guru Joined: 05 Jul 2004 Posts: 358

PS it genuinely looks fine to me I'm not just trying to wind you up

Maybe try looking at the screenshot on a different monitor?

Do you want to highlight something that looks particularly "ugly"? Any specific characters or pairs of characters in your screenshots?

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

I use Gnome rather than KDE, but these tips should work...

Try switching the font rendering to "monochrome" (i.e. absolutely raw), to see how horrendous it looks, and then switch back to sub-pixel rendering. That in itself might cure the problem with sub-pixel rendering apparently never turning itself on - you should see a difference with rainbow-ish colours along some of the font edges, if you look carefully.

Switch to "medium" or "slight" hinting - "full" hinting adds a bit too much distortion.

Small fonts will never look as smooth as large fonts - what looks bad at <= 10pt may look fine at >= 12pt. Can you switch to bitmap fonts after they go below a certain size?

A lot depends on the quality of the fonts you use. You should see an improvement if you copy *.ttf from c:\windows\fonts in your Windows partition, into /usr/share/fonts/TTF, then restart X - or at least "emerge corefonts". There are lots of free font packs available on the Internet. Run "emerge -s fonts" to see others available.

emerge fontconfig, and see if it changes any of your configuration files in /etc/fonts/

Use a font viewing program (e.g. nautilus in Gnome), and delete the fonts that look terrible.

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

I tried resetting sub-pixel rendering, but it didn't make a damn difference. There are all these knobs available with the fonts and none of them, save setting hinting to something other than "none", seem to do anything at all. Something must be blocking them from doing anything, but I can't seem to find what it is.

Also, what you guys aren't getting is that the fonts did look okay until I had my little fiasco with building my own X server and then reinstalling the one in portage. Somehow, that turned off the niceness (not that the fonts were perfect either).

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

Try creating a new user temporarily, and logging into KDE as that user. Perhaps it's some file in your own local ~/ KDE setup that's messed up.

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

I created a new user. No changes. Subpixel rendering seems to not want to work at all. I noticed it's no longer working on the KDM login screen like it was before. So it's messed up somewhere higher up the chain of configuration files.

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

Have you tried to re-emerge fontconfig?

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

Okay, just reemerged fontconfig, even upgraded it to the latest version (now ~x86). No change whatsoever.

I'm beginning to think this just isn't fixable.

Karim · Apprentice Joined: 13 Apr 2004 Posts: 218

I switched from crt to a Sony lcd recently, and I am disapointed at the font rendering. The kerning is awful sometimes.
Arial and Verdana looks to be the best bet.

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

southsider · Guru Joined: 05 Jul 2004 Posts: 358

OK here's the lowdown:

If you look at Tahoma in Windows, for example, 8pt @ 96dpi, you will notice it looks nothing like Tahoma at 16pt. This is hinting in effect making the font look sharper to snap it to pixels. But you already knew that.

Now the algorithms for doing that are apparently patented AFAIK, so your font system probably doesn't hint the fonts the same way. Try looking at Tahoma size 8pt and compare it.

Personally, once I got used to unhinted fonts and went back to Windows for a look, I really just wanted to turn it off there too.

Sounds like you are just too used to Windows fonts!

widremann · Veteran Joined: 14 Mar 2005 Posts: 1314

southsider · Guru Joined: 05 Jul 2004 Posts: 358

OK, post your /etc/fonts/fonts.conf, /etc/fonts/local.conf

And get rid of your ~/.fonts.conf.

And for the record, if you look in fonts.conf you will see that under the "alias" elements you can see the top answers are the "Bitstream Vera" family. On RedHat they are "Luxi" instead. This file maps "Sans", "Serif" and "Monospace" to real fonts. Bear in mind you should edit "local.conf" with these overrides if you want to keep your changes saved across config merges.

Alex

southsider · Guru Joined: 05 Jul 2004 Posts: 358

Example local.conf file with Luxi defaults:

(mine forces RGB (subpixel) anti-aliasing and disables hinting systemwide here, the settings in Gnome/KDE don't do anything)

southsider · Guru Joined: 05 Jul 2004 Posts: 358

And some pics.

Hinted Luxi with RGB anti-aliasing:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/janice.jones3/pics/hinted%20luxi.png

Unhinted Luxi with RGB anti-aliasing:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/janice.jones3/pics/unhinted%20luxi.png

I use the second, because the hinted fonts look distorted and blotchy.

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

Thanks for those pics. But - aren't "hinted" and "unhinted" the wrong way around?

southsider · Guru Joined: 05 Jul 2004 Posts: 358

Nope.