Ubuntu, Font Hinting, & You: A Cautionary Tale

This isn’t the first time I’ve encoun­te­red hin­ting; I’ve seen it before in GIMP, even when I was using it in Win­dows, this font ren­de­ring option that was inex­pli­cably on by default, and resul­ted in horri­ble ker­ning and missha­pen let­ter­forms. I don’t claim to know a lot about the tech­ni­ca­li­ties of hin­ting, but everything I do unders­tand about it agrees that it is meant to improve the sha­pes of let­ters. If this is the case, some­body is doing something very, very wrong. I haven’t seen a hin­ted font that loo­ked anything other than sickly and disheveled.

I’ve com­plai­ned before about the typo­graphy in Ubuntu, but my con­ten­tion then was with the fonts that were in use by default, not with the way they were ren­de­red. What I didn’t rea­lize at the time is that the ren­de­ring is the bulk of the problem.

I found this image on the Ubuntu site, and I am still in dis­be­lief that they choose to repre­sent them­sel­ves with font ren­de­ring like this. Look at that capi­tal ‘A’ and ‘V’; look at the way that lower-case ‘l’ towers over its neigh­bors, nothing more than a single-pixel-width ver­ti­cal line; look at the ker­ning in the ‘Rem’ of ‘Remove’ – it’s no won­der Ubuntu has about a 2% world­wide mar­ket share. They expect peo­ple to want to look at that every day of their lives? I know these are rela­ti­vely subtle details, but their effects are subli­mi­nal and, I believe, psycho­lo­gi­cally hazardous.

~/.fonts.conf

Of course, when it comes to Linux, for every pro­blem there are a few dozen solu­tions – or one very, very com­pli­ca­ted solu­tion. GNOME, the default desk­top for Ubuntu, arri­ves with a “Font Ren­de­ring Details” dia­log box in its appea­rance set­tings, to pla­cate the mouth-breathing phi­lis­ti­nes who need a GUI to get things done. And it doesn’t really help much. I knew I’d have to get my hands dirty in ~/.fonts.conf, this XML file that is capa­ble (and only capa­ble) of inc­re­dibly fine-tuned font tweaking.

[Fonts are] the #1 rea­son why Linux hasn’t seen any sig­ni­fi­cant adop­tion on the desktop/laptop yet. Robert Sco­ble

The trou­ble, as is the case with most Goo­gle results you get when loo­king for help with Linux, is that there is a glut of quick fixes, blocks of code direc­ted towards one spe­ci­fic per­son and their spe­ci­fic sys­tem, that they are then told to paste into a file or save into a direc­tory, with little to no expla­na­tion about why this solu­tion is going to work. Or there’s the tech­ni­cal docu­men­ta­tion that isn’t gea­red towards users. There’s no middle ground (unless you count the occa­sio­nal, ske­le­tal wiki that hasn’t been upda­ted since 2004).

Only after loo­king at count­less ~/.fonts.conf exam­ples was I able to glean what was going on inside them. The full power of this file allows you to tar­get with ama­zing pre­ci­sion any variant or size of any font your sys­tem might dis­play and give it its own uni­que pro­per­ties; but there are really only three(ish) of these pro­per­ties that you need to know about, and I am going to explain them here.

antia­lias

Anti-aliasing is the trick that makes your pixels not look like pixels. You’ve noti­ced this when you’ve seen poorly resi­zed ima­ges with jag­ged edges – they’re not pro­perly anti-aliased. Simi­larly, if fonts are not anti-aliased, they look like black Tetris pie­ces on a white back­ground. Anti-aliasing is going on all the time without you kno­wing about it, and you’d really have to make an effort not to have it, but it’s worth put­ting in your ~/.fonts.conf file for good mea­sure. You’ll want to apply it to all fonts on your sys­tem, so the syn­tax would be:

<match target="font">
 <edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
  <bool>true</bool>
 </edit>
</match>

You can pro­bably figure out what these things mean, but I will link to a com­plete manual for ~/.fonts.conf syn­tax at the end of this post.

rgba

This one is a mat­ter of per­so­nal pre­fe­rence, I guess. I don’t see how any­body of sound mind could stand to have pink, beige, and tur­quoise pixels sprin­kled around the edges of their let­ters – the result of “sub-pixel ren­de­ring” – but I guess the argu­ment is that it allows them to be shar­per. Whatever.

Trust me when I say that things look best if you tell ~/.fonts.conf to disa­ble sub-pixel ren­de­ring, which is done like so:

<match target="font">
 <edit name="rgba" mode="assign">
  <const>none</const>
 </edit>
</match>

If you hap­pen to be schi­zoph­re­nic, or color­blind or wha­te­ver, then yes, fine, you can turn on sub-pixel ren­de­ring by chan­ging none to rgb, to reflect the com­po­si­tion of your monitor’s sub­pi­xels (which are almost cer­tainly in the order Red-Green-Blue, from left to right). Have fun scratching your eye­balls out.

rgba=rgb

rgba=none

Admit­tedly it would be nice if there were some antialiasstyle pro­perty you could set to antialiasslight or something, to ligh­ten up those gray pixels a little bit.

hin­ting / autohint / hintstyle

Put it on my tombs­tone: Turn Off Hin­ting. I’m beg­ging you. If some­body tries to tell you that this is a mat­ter of pre­fe­rence, they are lying to you, and are not your friend, and are pro­bably ban­ging your girl­friend. If you leave hin­ting on, Geor­gia will not look like Geor­gia, Lucida will not look like Lucida, and Nim­bus will not look like Helvetica.

hintstyle=hintnone

hinting=true, autohint=true

Here is how you Turn Off Hinting®:

<match target="font">
 <edit name="hinting" mode="assign">
  <bool>false</bool>
 </edit>
 <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
  <bool>false</bool>
 </edit>
 <edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign">
  <const>hintnone</const>
 </edit>
</match>

Alter­na­ti­vely, if you posi­ti­vely demand more “crisp­ness” from your fonts, even at the expense of aesthe­tics, you might want to give slight hin­ting a try. From the above code, change hinting and autohint to true, and hintstyle to hintslight:

hintstyle=hintslight

That’s it, roughly spea­king. It’s my unders­tan­ding that some spe­ci­fic fonts do look bet­ter if spe­ci­fi­cally tar­ge­ted and adjus­ted with maybe slight hin­ting. But that’s for another day. If you do as I’ve ins­truc­ted, things will be so much bet­ter for you. Leave a com­ment if you want my Pay­Pal address.

This post would not have been pos­si­ble without the help of these sites:

• Arch­Wiki: I know nothing about Arch Linux, but this wiki page has a lot of good info.
• fontconfig.org: the most com­plete and recent ~/.fonts.conf refe­rence I’ve found.
• Ubuntu Wiki: con­tains an exam­ple of a very com­prehen­sive (if dated) ~/.fonts.conf file. Study it and learn how to do other stuff.
• The Mas­ter­plan: another sam­ple ~/.fonts.conf file, and the only other one that I know of that turns off hin­ting and sub­pi­xel rendering.