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Thursday, February 3, 2011

How to have beautiful fonts under linux??

One of the common complain that I have seen from new users switching over to Linux from Windows
is that they find the default Fonts installed are not that 'great' 'clean' 'crisp' as in windows.

Most  modern Linux distros including Fedora do not enable any type of "anti-aliasing" out of the box. This leads to impression that the Fonts and rendering on Linux is not that good or as good as Windows or a Mac system. This is not true at all, under fedora core 14 (KDE)

Click Fedora Menu >  Computer > System Settings > Application Appearance > Fonts > Use anti-aliasing = Enabled, Now Click Configure; Tick Use Sub-pixel rendering = RGB Hinting style = Full; Ok


Fedora users can also download a patched version of freetype to have better results.
http://www.infinality.net/fedora/linux/14/x86_64/freetype-infinality-2.4.3-2.20101117_1.fc14.x86_64.rpm

(I have tested this patch on a 15" laptop and 24" wide screen lcd 1920x1080 resolution with good results)

Or you can also download the latest source http://sourceforge.net/projects/freetype/files/freetype2/2.4.4/freetype-2.4.4.tar.bz2/download

and compile them ...

./configure
make -j6
make install

You must log off or reboot for the new setting to be in affect. Finally do remember that fonts and amount of "tweaking" aka anti-aliasing is a pure matter of personal taste and aesthetic sense. So do not be afraid to test and experiment with the settings to find your own sweet comfort spot. :D 

1 comment:

  1. Excellent writeup to get more in depth info
    "A Treatise on Font Rasterisation With an Emphasis on Free Software"

    https://freddie.witherden.org/pages/font-rasterisation/

    ReplyDelete