HOWTO: Font rendering like ubuntu (Page 1 of 3)

Thanks for the guide. Do you have a before picture to compare to?

Thanks for responses. I really appreciate it.

I reproduce install of my packages on freshly installed system. Everything just fine.
I've modified article and added images after and before.

I cant see the difference ? :-/ ? - what too look for?

I must warn people with big (>100) dpi. On such monitors you hardly see the difference. This font rendering is intented to monitors with small (<97) dpi. I have 19 inch monitor with native resolution 1280x1024 it is about 81 dpi And i can see furry glyphs with standart BCI render, that comes with Statler. So this font render is my savior, not to hurt my eyes

By default ubuntu uses slight hinting, you could set this by changing
<edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign"><const>hintfull</const></edit>
to
<edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign"><const>hintslight</const></edit>

Whatever I do with whatever Linux flavor, I never get satisfying results on a 22 inch screen.
Just look at the screenshots, the difference between then and now is hardly noticable. Look at those Arial fonts on the web page - nearly unreadable! On my screen there is exactly two(!) fonts that are usable at all - DejaVuSans and Verdana. As a result I have to fix the font settings in Firefox in a way, that the content settings are ignored.

Font rendering is an issue that has to be addressed finally.

Sorry for the rant.

Last edited by qbrick (2010-04-23 07:32:24)

There is differnce. Look at iggykoopa's post. About Arial - i think it looks fine.
There is some issue about DejaVu look at the screenshot

I don't know why developers of this font have such hate about russian glyphs, but you can see how it looks. So i have to use anything but dejavu font. Look at my screens, arial looks just fine compare to above screen.

I must admit - there is no free usable fonts under linux, we have to use Droid and Microsoft Core fonts. Font rendering i've gave here broke some patents, but ubuntu devs don't worry about this, and, i think, we should too. So use these packages at your own risk

@pvsage

Hmm, Mac using not AA but hinting. Please read this http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … smoothing/

@pvsage
About Mac - about hinting was my thoughts, so you can read it as IMHO. One of my friends have hacintosh and i don't like font render there (for me it's really ugly and furry). Maybe it because of hacintosh.

It seems that i'm the only one from russia here
Here is explanation of screenshot
hinting - on, hintfull
lcdfilter - lcddefault
autohint - off

All in DejaVu, 4 lines per sections, in that sequence
1 line - normal
2 line - normal italic
3 line - normal bold
4 line - normal bold italic

1 section - Sans English

2 section - Sans Cyrillic
3-4 lines, look at glyphs "ъ" and "э" its blurry

3 section - Serif Cyrillic
3-4 lines, most of glyphs blurry

4 section - Sans Cyrillic (big size)
here for example, on big size glyphs we have old problems

How ubuntu solve this issue - they using hintslight. With slight hinting glyphs looks good (not for all DPIs). So i switched to hintslight and still searching for better font(Uralic not so good).

Thanks for hint about ttf-uralic.

pvsage, you can adjust them in a local .fonts.conf (fontconfig). One might have already come with the default install on the openbox version (not sure, I just usually copy my old one over). There are a bunch of options where you can switch hinting (and it looks like different lcd filter types are switchable too, from what I'm seeing with the patched libraries) by specific font, size or weight. I've been playing around with the fine tuning options for a few days and it's pretty cool. You can pick a font for the console and turn off a lot of the filtering (to minimize color artifacts on light text) while keeping some anti-aliasing and I'm still messing around with that. Not the same as the bitmapped fonts, but so far not bad. If you get a good bitmapped scheme going that would be awesome.

There's also Xfont settings you can adjust with an .Xresources file (see note at the bottom).

There's some good reading here on font config: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fon … g_Examples

and on the main font page: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration

A quick way to check for syntax errors is to run "gedit &" from a terminal (you don't actually really need to use gedit, unless you want, it just reads from the config file and it opens fast). If there are any it'll throw them back with the line numbers to the console right away.

Since I'm using he patched libraries kodx posted, they might make a difference on some of the effects, but when I'm all done tweaking I'll probably post up my config.

I was also booting to the live cd to compare and I realized that the default is pretty danged good! I think all I'm trying to do is smooth a little bit here and tighten a bit there, but not change it *too* much.

Edit- I just switched over to my XP box to do some video work and realized I need to touch up the cleartype tuning on that since it looks fuzzy now. I think I've been staring at fonts so much I'm going crosseyed.

Another edit- some things seem to be favoring the Xft (Xfont) settings in .Xresources over .fonts.conf so I'm playing with that more to figure out how they work together.

Last edited by chillicampari (2010-04-28 04:20:40)

:DWhew!

the sample is pretty big, so a larger version is at tinypic. It's not exactly right since they convert to jpeg (I should probably find another free host) but it should give you an idea of what it looks like. You'll want to make sure your browser isn't scaling it down 'cause that looks fugly so make sure it's at 100%.

To keep with the examples kodx posted, the top browser is Chromium and the site is the Yahoo main page. I...umm.. didn't take a before screenshot before I started doing this and it's sort of a long way back since I'd have to back out the patched libraries too). Sorry! I'll try to remember to do that if I start fresh with the beta. 

The .fonts.conf file should be in the pastebin. It's full of inline notes. Probably way too many but that way I'll remember what I'm looking at.

http://crunchbanglinux.org/pastebin/607

It's not really an extreme difference (or shouldn't be), and I think most people won't even notice it's different, but it's been fun to play with.

Last edited by chillicampari (2010-04-29 17:41:35)

@chillicampari
Wow... i just tried your fonts.conf... and it's a big difference! Here on the forum pages, on twitter and some other pages.
I'm not sure i like it though    but it's a start to explore the font config myself.

cheers,
tuna

Cool! Tweaking it can be pretty fun to see the different things it'll do. The last couple of weeks I've been using rgb subpixel rendering and the lccdefault filter enabled. I didn't really care for those settings before since they looked a little too painted on for my taste but either I've gotten used to it, or maybe it's going better with some of the other settings like having the autohinter off. Now the older config (in the pastebin) looks a bit bright when I try it.

Can't get Firefox to use the filtering though, so it stands out quite a bit from everything else. Midori and Chrome/Chromium match up nicely though.

@discovery That's a good question! We're a pretty non-shooty group here so no worries.

@kodx, I noticed the update in the OP with the pastebin link and screenshot. Neat, and thanks!!!

Edit- I've added my current .fonts.conf (most of the notes are stripped out on this one, and the fonts substitutions are a bit different). Sites using Georgia, Lucida Grande  and MS Trebuchet are a lot more readable to me now. And I've subbed out some other common fonts just as personal preference. 

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">

<!-- 05/25/2010 -->
<!-- This is a work in progress font config file from the CrunchBang Linux forums thread: 
http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/post/66205/ 

with help from the Arch font wiki:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration -->

<fontconfig>
   <match target="font">
        <edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
        <edit mode="assign" name="rgba"><const>rgb</const></edit>
        <edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter"><const>lcddefault</const></edit>
        <edit name="hinting" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
        <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle"><const>hintfull</const></edit>
        <edit mode="assign" name="autohint"><bool>false</bool></edit>
    </match>

    <alias>
    <family>serif</family>
    <prefer><family>DejaVu Serif</family></prefer>
    </alias>
    <alias>
    <family>sans</family>
    <prefer><family>DejaVu Sans</family></prefer>
    </alias>
    <alias>
    <family>monospace</family>
    <prefer><family>DejaVu mono</family></prefer>
    </alias>  

   <match target="pattern" name="family" >
        <test name="family" qual="any" >
            <string>Arial</string>
        </test>
        <edit mode="assign" name="family" >
            <string>DejaVu Sans</string>
        </edit>
   </match>

   <match target="pattern" name="family" >
        <test name="family" qual="any" >
            <string>Tahoma</string>
        </test>
        <edit mode="assign" name="family" >
            <string>DejaVu Sans</string>
        </edit>
   </match>

   <match target="pattern" name="family" >
        <test name="family" qual="any" >
            <string>Verdana</string>
        </test>
        <edit mode="assign" name="family" >
            <string>DejaVu Sans</string>
        </edit>
   </match>

 <match target="pattern" name="family" >
        <test name="family" qual="any" >
            <string>Courier New</string>
        </test>
        <edit mode="assign" name="family" >
            <string>Liberation mono</string>
        </edit>
    </match>

 <match target="pattern" name="family" >
        <test name="family" qual="any" >
            <string>Times New Roman</string>
        </test>
        <edit mode="assign" name="family" >
            <string>DejaVu Serif</string>
        </edit>
    </match>

    <match target="pattern" name="family" >
        <test name="family" qual="any" >
            <string>Times</string>
        </test>
        <edit mode="assign" name="family" >
            <string>DejaVu Serif</string>
        </edit>
    </match> 

    <match target="pattern" name="family" >
        <test name="family" qual="any" >
            <string>Georgia</string>
        </test>
        <edit mode="assign" name="family" >
            <string>DejaVu Serif</string>
        </edit>
    </match> 

    <match target="pattern" name="family" >
        <test name="family" qual="any" >
            <string>Lucida Grande</string>
        </test>
        <edit mode="assign" name="family" >
            <string>DejaVu Sans</string>
        </edit>
    </match>

  <match target="pattern" name="family" >
        <test name="family" qual="any" >
            <string>Trebuchet MS</string>
        </test>
        <edit mode="assign" name="family" >
            <string>DejaVu Sans</string>
        </edit>
    </match>
  
</fontconfig>

Last edited by chillicampari (2010-05-26 02:13:03)