Improve Fedora's font rendering?

[Icedrake]

Fedora's current font rendering looks pretty ugly I must say. Is it possible to improve the font rendering so that it looks like Ubuntu's?

[DBelton]

I too am pretty unhappy about Fedora's font rendering. It seems as though every time I find a fix someplace that makes it look a little better, then something gets updated and it's back to the same crappy looking fonts.

[marko]

You can install the infinality packages: freetype-infinality infinality-settings

See the section labeled "Fedora Users":

http://www.infinality.net/blog/infin...etype-patches/

[Icedrake]

Originally Posted by marko

You can install the infinality packages: freetype-infinality infinality-settings

See the section labeled "Fedora Users":

http://www.infinality.net/blog/infin...etype-patches/

I copied and pasted the command that it gave into terminal, but it said that I'm not in the sudoers file and that it'll be reported.

[Mariusz W]

Originally Posted by DBelton

I too am pretty unhappy about Fedora's font rendering. It seems as though every time I find a fix someplace that makes it look a little better, then something gets updated and it's back to the same crappy looking fonts.

You probably remember several threads and numerous posts devoted to the topic of ugly font rendering after these (wrongheaded, in my opinion) changes to the font rendering mechanism were first introduced in Fedora 15. You can easily locate them by searching for "fonts" and "ugly". I have little reason to believe the credibility of such reports: it suffices to spend two afternoons going through all the "themes" for various desktop environmenets, created and proudly presented by Linux users, to discover that 99.9% are plain ugly.

[DBelton]

you can run it using

su -c instead of sudo, or just sign into a root shell and run all the commands without sudo

su -
(root password)

rpm -Uvh http://www.infinality.net/fedora/linux/infinality-repo-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

yum install freetype-infinality infinality-settings

[Icedrake]

Originally Posted by DBelton

you can run it using

su -c instead of sudo, or just sign into a root shell and run all the commands without sudo

su -
(root password)

rpm -Uvh http://www.infinality.net/fedora/linux/infinality-repo-1.0-1.noarch.rpm

yum install freetype-infinality infinality-settings

That worked great, and holy cow, my fonts look so much better.

[oboedad55]

Originally Posted by Icedrake

That worked great, and holy cow, my fonts look so much better.

Yes, for me too. Thanks so much for the link! That was the one thing driving me crazy.

[AdamW]

good lord, that package sure hacks the hell out of freetype. freetype-entire-infinality-patchset-20111117-1.patch is huuuuuge. i wonder if he's ever submitted that stuff upstream.

[Infinality]

Originally Posted by AdamW

good lord, that package sure hacks the hell out of freetype. freetype-entire-infinality-patchset-20111117-1.patch is huuuuuge. i wonder if he's ever submitted that stuff upstream.

The subpixel hinting patch will be in Freetype soon. The extra enhancements won't be, yet anyway, because they are somewhat hacky.

---------- Post added at 06:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:01 PM ----------

Originally Posted by DBelton

I installed the infinality patches on one of my machines here that I had played around with and gotten most of my fonts looking halfway decent (except for Firefox), but after installing the infinality patches, it looks decent for some things, but Firefox is even worse

Try lowering the alignment and fitting settings in /etc/profile.d/infinality-settings.sh, or use one of the examples and set it to NUDGE or CLASSIC... those ones do less/no snapping, which is what some people aren't liking.

[DBelton]

I installed the infinality patches on one of my machines here that I had played around with and gotten most of my fonts looking halfway decent (except for Firefox), but after installing the infinality patches, it looks decent for some things, but Firefox is even worse

[DBelton]

Thanks Infinality

I started out trying the examples down close to the end, and the CLASSIC one seemed to clear up the Firefox fonts some.

Now I have lots more settings to play around with and get screwed up

It is looking better though, so hopefully I will have it looking good without totally hosing my system

But, it does appear to me that if it takes this much hacking just to get freetype to decently render the fonts, then something major is wrong with freetype.

[Infinality]

Originally Posted by DBelton

But, it does appear to me that if it takes this much hacking just to get freetype to decently render the fonts, then something major is wrong with freetype.

As far as it relates to Windows fonts, it's not Freetype's fault. The fonts were encoded with instructions to make them render in B/W pixels, not AA. In other words, the fonts were hacked to death by MS, so to make them look nice, we have to hack the TT renderer in Freetype to death.

If you use default slight hinting and the default LCD filter with Freetype (Fedora disables this I think, for reasons I don't know), you really do get a nice result. It's just that most people expect Arial to render a certain way.... Freetype's render of it is a "different" nice result.

[hadrons123]

infinality has always worked good in my fedora.I have a WSXGA+ panel and it fits great.

google chrome font rendering is not as good as firefox and its the only gripe for me.

keep up the good work infinality.

[Infinality]

Originally Posted by hadrons123

infinality has always worked good in my fedora.I have a WSXGA+ panel and it fits great.

google chrome font rendering is not as good as firefox and its the only gripe for me.

keep up the good work infinality.

Thanks! Your Chrome issue might be related to this:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/is...etail?id=96926

If so, that's Chrome's fault.