Getting Beautiful Fonts in Gentoo Linux

18 Responses to Getting Beautiful Fonts in Gentoo Linux

1. kucrut says:

   December 4, 2009 at 3:53 am

   Thanks! You just made my day :)
2. Jeremy Olexa says:

   December 4, 2009 at 8:11 am

   I prefer *not* to have corefonts on my system. There are many more free alternatives.
3. Dion Moult says:

   December 4, 2009 at 8:30 pm

   My own setup: http://e2-productions.com/imgbin/albums/fonts.png
   Using mainly “Liberation Sans” with this .fonts.conf

   <?xml version="1.0"?>
   <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
   <fontconfig>
    <match target="font" >
     <edit mode="assign" name="autohint" >
      <bool>true</bool>
     </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="font" >
     <edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
      <const>none</const>
     </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="font" >
     <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
      <bool>false</bool>
     </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="font" >
     <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
      <const>hintnone</const>
     </edit>
    </match>
    <match target="font" >
     <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
      <bool>true</bool>
     </edit>
    </match>
   </fontconfig>
   

   Did not think about separate settings for bold fonts – will check it out.

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5. HS says:

   December 6, 2009 at 6:21 am

   I have to say I do not like it. It looks too blurry (on your screenshot and on my desktop if I enable those fontconfig options; it is most visible on the menu bar). But if I disable the ’10-autohint.conf’ (and leave the ’10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf’) then it looks awesome – sharp; except for KDE 4 applicattions – they have more blurred fonts, maybe they are now doing double subpixel rendering or so, not sure where is the problem.
6. Alessandro says:

   December 8, 2009 at 2:51 am

   A little of topic…How to obtain correct visualization of languages like Gujarati or Malayalam in Firefox? I see that in your wikipedia screenshot, you’re able too visualize these characters correctly…but I can’t. I see just rectangles…
   How to see everything properly like you?
7. Mike Bonar says:

   December 9, 2009 at 1:54 pm

   Thanks for that excellent guide.
8. kev009 says:

   December 10, 2009 at 6:03 am

   @HS
   You may want to double check your monitor type. This guide was written assuming RGB LCD displays, and you need to make sure Xorg recognizes the DPI properly. If you have a BGR display (somewhat rare but I had one.. the Dell 1800FP) you will need to enable that .conf instead.

   KDE apps have additional settings in System Settings->Appearance->Fonts. You can disable hinting there as well.

   @Alessandro
   This should be covered by the font list I provided.
9. pedro says:

   January 22, 2010 at 1:06 pm

   Sorry man but your font rendering is terrible. I’m just trying to get the fonts working right because they look exactly the same way on my machine ;-)

   Generally speaking, I found out (so far) that Firefox either use its own rendering or at least its own settings for cairo and/or freetype. Fonts in Firefox always look great as they do on your screenshot. Unfortunatelly this has nothing to do with your fonts settings. Firefox simply ignores these. Thus the only relevant part of your screenshot is the top menubar with blurry fonts. You’ll findout for yourself that any other application in your system renders fonts exactly in this ugly way and not in the way Firefox rendered Wikipedia page for you.

   My tip is to disable bindist for freetype but not sure whether this will help. I’ll give it a try ;-)
10. Nick Black says:

    January 23, 2010 at 12:36 am

    I’d also recommend the (unfree) Mathematica fonts, as pulled in by Debian’s mathematica-fonts package:

    http://packages.debian.org/sid/mathematica-fonts
11. pedro says:

    January 23, 2010 at 11:28 am

    Do not ask people to share their thoughts if you do not like to hear their opinion. I pointed out yesterday that Firefox renders fonts on itself and therefore the only relevant part of your screenshot is the top menu that really has the fonts blurry to my liking. You deleted this almost immediately ;-)
    Well, I solved the issue for myself and came back to share the solution with you and other people here. But having the experience with your nazi behavior, I simply will not. Enjoy you crappy fonts :-)))
12. kev009 says:

    January 24, 2010 at 8:09 pm

    @pedro
    First, I didn’t delete your post. I moderate posts so my site doesn’t become a spam bucket. I must have missed the point where you pay for my bandwidth or time it requires to do this, so sorry for only doing it every week or so ;-).

    YES, DISABLE BINDIST on freetype. This allows for the hinting as required by the settings in this guide.

    Also, this is the first time I’ve been victim to Godwin’s law :-O.
13. Arc says:

    February 2, 2010 at 9:37 am

    Thanks for the list of fonts.

    “euse –enable truetype type1 cleartype corefonts”

    Should be “type3″.
14. brebs says:

    May 21, 2010 at 1:18 am

    pedro, use Firefox’s –enable-system-cairo

    All, read the huge Gentoo fonts thread if you want your desktop pretty:
    http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-6183606.html#6183606

    Ubuntu’s patches should be used, if you *really* care about your font rendering.
15. Daniel says:

    May 31, 2010 at 12:52 pm

    w00t! very helpful, thanks!! =)
16. Bob says:

    July 5, 2010 at 4:37 am

    My eyes, my eyes, arggghh….

    The fonts were so blurry that I wanted to gouge them out. Disabling cleartype in cairo solved them problem. Very happy with the result now. Cheers.
17. ogredeschnique says:

    July 8, 2010 at 10:04 am

    Thanks for the guide.

    My fonts were not blurry enough. They were fat in some areas instead of fading and looking smooth.
18. Isaac says:

    July 22, 2010 at 8:29 am

    Thanks!! Looks so much better. And it fixed an odd issue in Chromium with squares/boxes showing up in Gmail and other random pages.