Comments on: Ubuntu, Font Hinting, & You: A Cautionary Tale

By: imercado

imercado — Sun, 22 May 2011 10:00:10 +0000

EXCELLENT post. I came to this site after wondering what “hinting” was and I had also noticed that there wasn’t nearly enough variation between the available font choices, so THANK YOU very much for clearing that up! After using Windows and Macs for so long, I, too, was very disappointed with the “Kindergarten” feel of the default Ubuntu font rendering.

I agree with BATH that it’s much easier (and safer) to make most of these changes in the Appearance item in the Control Center (Ubuntu 11.04). After swapping back and forth, I found DejaVu Sans Condensed to be a great choice and it gave me slightly more screen real estate than Trebuchet MS (suggested in another blog regarding installation of the MS True Type fonts). For me, I needed the Subpixel smoothing as opposed to the Grayscale, which doesn’t work well against certain background colors.

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By: Web Typography in Ubuntu: Part 1 · kbps

Web Typography in Ubuntu: Part 1 · kbps — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:32:54 +0000

[…] also want to stress that this is not a matter of personal preference; unlike my insistence upon no hinting — which I admit was subjective, but which I played up for effect — these […]

By: Jay

Jay — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:09:42 +0000

:SHAKES FIST:

By: walley

walley — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 08:26:33 +0000

fullhintig and antialias off is the way to go!:)

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:05:08 +0000

Good question, bluegeek. ~/.fonts.conf is processed after the GNOME font settings, thus taking precedence over them. So nothing should be affected by the GNOME font settings.

By: bluegeek

bluegeek — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:25:05 +0000

How the gnome fonts settings interact with the fonts.conf settings? which one prevails? do I have to reset the gnome font settings?

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:57:09 +0000

Do not listen to this man! He means to deceive you!

@Bath: Actually, choosing “None” in the hinting section of font appearances doesn’t truly remove hinting, it only reduces it to slight. Weird, huh?

By: Disciple of "Bob"

Disciple of "Bob" — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:43:12 +0000

These instructions are fantastic if you enjoy text that looks like it was written on a paper towel with a felt tip pen. If, on the other hand, you actually read text and don’t just consider it decoration, you’ll want to skip this and let the “crispness” win out over the “aesthetics” that gives the author the vapours.