Bad font rendering affects numerous applications

Mariusz W · #1 26th May 2011, 09:17 AM

I just preupgraded from Fedora 14 to 15 on my Toshiba NB205 netbook (the preupgrade went smoothly by the way).

Immediately upon logging in, I discovered catastrophically poor quality of font rendering in every terminal window program I tried, (and I checked plenty like LilyTerm, Sakura, gnome-terminal, etc) and in web-browsers.

The symptoms are the same for all applications: the glyphs are very thin, anorectic, and very ugly.

The described behavior is desktop independent: same in Gnome (3 and the fallback mode), fluxbox, Openbox.

nbecker · #2 26th May 2011, 01:30 PM

First thing I'd try is removing all font stuff:

mv ~/.fontconfig ~/.fontconfig.old
mv ~/.fonts.conf ~/.fonts.conf.old
mv ~/.fonts ~/.fonts.old < might not have this

and logout/login.

If that doesn't work, try install freetype-freeworld from rpmfusion, and reboot. (Actually, I would just always do this regardless)

Mariusz W · #3 26th May 2011, 06:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nbecker

First thing I'd try is removing all font stuff:

mv ~/.fontconfig ~/.fontconfig.old
mv ~/.fonts.conf ~/.fonts.conf.old
mv ~/.fonts ~/.fonts.old < might not have this

and logout/login.

Both ~/.fonts.conf and ~/.fonts wre absent in my installation, and ~/.fontconfig contained only font cache files. Still, renaming ~/.fontconfig to ~/.fontconfig.old improved font rendering, so thank you for the suggestion.

Extreme thinness of the Regular weigh remains and affects all fonts. SInce Bold weight is rendered as it was before the upgrade, the imbalance between the Bold and the Regular weights is very conspicuous and unpleasant to the eye.

Another effect the extreme thinness of the Regular weight creates is: most terminal emulators provide several color schemes; now, all light-text -on-dark-background schemes look awful.

Quote:

If that doesn't work, try install freetype-freeworld from rpmfusion, and reboot. (Actually, I would just always do this regardless)

The freetype library is installed by default (I just checked that in my installation counting around 1450 packages, exactly 456 depended on freetype).

Nevertheless, I installed also freetype-freeworld, as you suggested, and rebooted. Unfortunately, nothing has changed.

For clarity, I would like to add that after moving ~/.fontconfig to ~/.fontconfig.old, I have no more font related files in my home directory.

carterpants · #4 26th May 2011, 07:05 PM

I've noticed the same thing. The font seems blurry and I can't seem to find a way to change this. I'm using a 23" LCD monitor and a 19" LCD monitor, both are displaying rather poor font edges.

I'll try removing the ~/.font* stuff tonight and see what that gains me. What would be nice is to have the Font selection options like we did F14 where you could select between several font types..

Mariusz W · #5 26th May 2011, 07:25 PM

Additional observations:

Increasing font size one step up from the default size produces a drastic increase in glyph thickness of the Regular weight of a font. I observed this both in a web browser (Firefox) and terminal windows (gnome-terminal, LilyTerm). Imabalance between Regular and Bold disappears. However, rendering is still defective: differences between thinner and thicker parts of the glyph become exaggerated which creates unpleasant visual effect especially with light-text-on-the-dark-background.

Unless somebody offers a better explanation of what is happening, my impression is that the Fedora 15 freetype package is the source of all this trouble. That package comes with no configuration files of its own, just the library and a few text files containing information for the user.

I would like to assess the situation better before filing bug reports. Possibly, somebody knows or observes something that may contribute to tracing the source of this font rendering problem and may help resolving it.

dd_wizard · #6 26th May 2011, 07:29 PM

Have you tried installing gnome-tweak-tool and changing hinting/antialiasing under Fonts? You need this for LCD displays.

dd_wizard

Mariusz W · #7 26th May 2011, 07:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dd_wizard

Have you tried installing gnome-tweak-tool and changing hinting/antialiasing under Fonts? You need this for LCD displays.

dd_wizard

No, I haven't. Thank you for the suggestion. I do not have any reason however to blame this behavior on the changes introduced in GNOME: the same behavior occurs in fluxbox and Openbox. Others reported it in KDE.

carterpants · #8 26th May 2011, 07:55 PM

I have installed the tweaks and I have played around with those settings, but the other options besides anti aliased are even worse.

roneisele · #9 26th May 2011, 11:04 PM

My situation is (potentially) very different from yours as I performed a clean install of Fedora 15, but I found a mention on this board recently of patches from Infinality which greatly improves font rendering/antialiasing appearance in Fedora.

In my opinion, they worked wonders and the difference was night-and-day on my machine.

Link

Mariusz W · #10 27th May 2011, 03:25 AM

Thank you for this valuable link, roneisele.

jtfolden · #11 27th May 2011, 04:58 AM

Yes, the freetype-infinality package (and the accompanying fontconfig package) greatly improved font rendering for me.

Mariusz W · #12 27th May 2011, 05:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jtfolden

Yes, the freetype-infinality package (and the accompanying fontconfig package) greatly improved font rendering for me.

How did you install which here means: where did you find that package?

jtfolden · #13 27th May 2011, 05:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mariusz W

How did you install which here means: where did you find that package?

I downloaded:
http://www.infinality.net/fedora/lin....fc15.i686.rpm
http://www.infinality.net/fedora/lin...4_2.noarch.rpm

You can find other packages here:
http://www.infinality.net/fedora/linux/

I did *not* use the repo rpm as it seemed to want to install F14 packages instead of the F15 ones.

**AdamW** · #14 27th May 2011, 07:28 AM

it would help if you'd provide screenshots so we know exactly what you're talking about and if your font rendering is as intended or not, because font rendering is a *highly* subjective area, and what to one person is 'bad', 'ugly' and/or 'horrible' to another is just peachy. So it's very hard to discuss it with only descriptions.

Ard Righ · #15 27th May 2011, 09:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AdamW

it would help if you'd provide screenshots so we know exactly what you're talking about and if your font rendering is as intended or not, because font rendering is a *highly* subjective area, and what to one person is 'bad', 'ugly' and/or 'horrible' to another is just peachy. So it's very hard to discuss it with only descriptions.

Adam I think the issue is that hinting appears disabled altogether in Fedora 15, by default. Installed on my laptop today, and the first thing I noticed when reading was how thin and jagged the fonts appeared.

This wouldn't normally be a problem, in previous releases, as we could alter the hinting under the Appearance font dialogue. But that dialogue has now been removed.

For all LCD users, especially laptops, lack of hinting for LCDs is a killer on the eyes