Now however details are starting to emerge. OMG! Ubuntu! describes how to get a bootleg copy of it. And at UDS back in May, Bruno Maag gave a session entitled “Making Beautiful Fonts” in which he elaborated on the creation of the new font. There is now video of that session, as well as the slides, which were sadly not included in the frame.

My first impression is that it feels a bit too stiff, rigid, and tech-y. Of course there’s no way to tell until you use it on your desktop. Reassuring, however, that they’re giving it proper italics.

Several of these fonts are better served by some Ubuntu defaults, and still others — Gill Sans, Optima, Caslon, Tahoma, and more — have decent substitutes just waiting in the repositories. Typography plays a greater role in user experience than I think most people working on Ubuntu realize, and it should be a goal of 10.10 to elevate this part of the OS as much as possible. This requires just a few extra kilobytes in packages and some changes/additions to the files in /etc/fonts/conf.d/. In a subsequent post I’ll be cataloging what those changes should be.

But it’s important to recognize first of all that this is a significant part of the reason that many find Ubuntu (and Linux in general) to have a “cheap” look. In many cases I even see serifs standing in place of sans-serifs, whose small sizes make the serifs nearly illegible where a sans would read just fine. And the poor substitutions and meager range of reproducible fonts makes for a very flat experience — when everything’s in either Liberation Sans or DejaVu Serif, it’s hard not to feel that you’re getting a crippled version of the web. These problems are the result of a sheer lack of concern for how words are presented on-screen. Now more than ever they need to be addressed, as much (if not the majority) of computing now takes places in a browser.

I 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 substitutions are plainly incorrect. Sure, you may prefer that Google’s pages show up in, say, Bitstream Charter, and you’re free to make that the case. But when the intentions of web designers are so poorly adhered to by Ubuntu’s defaults, it results in a major communications gap.

This is also not a burden to place on the web designers. For one thing, they can’t be blamed for designing for Windows and Mac, when those OSes account for over 95% of their users. Virtually everybody has Verdana, and they can’t reasonably be expected to look up the Linux equivalent for every nearly universal font they want to invoke — if such a reference were to exist in the first place. Second, when it is perfectly within our power to rectify the communication of type between websites and a default user, then we owe it to ourselves to do so as the contributors to a Linux distribution whose explicit goal is to gain traction with the layperson. While Linux in general and Ubuntu in particular offer several practical advantages over Mac and Windows, you can’t win hearts and minds without the polished exterior of a carefully considered and meticulously refined visual experience. And type is of paramount urgency for that experience.

Avant Garde Demi-Bold and Book Condensed. I think. I’m not sure about that capital ‘G’ though.

Other than the type, I think I like it.

Details from Jono and the wiki.

Analysis to follow.

I also think I saw a single straight quote where an apostrophe should have been.

I knew that Google isn’t so great with their stylesheets, in some cases declaring a font-family of just “Arial,” with no “sans-serif” backup in the font-stack (which would, of course, let Firefox substitute in whichever default sans the user had set – in my case, Nimbus).

I also knew through playing around with ~/fonts.conf that Linux allows you to define substitutions for different font names. It was my hunch that there was something new about Jaunty (which has been praised for its better presentation of text) that defined Liberation Sans – the font I determined I was looking at – as the preferable substitute for Arial.

After looking around a bit I found the culprit in /etc/fonts/conf.avail/30-metric-aliases.conf. Around line 182 you should see the beginning of a section devoted to the Microsoft typefaces, and shortly under that (around line 186), the line:

<family>Liberation Sans</family>

Just above that, insert the following line:

<family>Nimbus Sans L</family>

Reboot your system, and when you’re back up, Ubuntu should now replace any calls for Arial with Nimbus Sans.

Of course, this should only be done if you prefer Nimbus Sans. It’s been claimed that Liberation Sans is better hinted than either Nimbus or FreeSans, and from the looks of things, it is. Still, I just prefer Nimbus. That serif on the upper-case ‘J’ in Libertine especially bothers me.

I still love Linux Libertine as a Times substitute, however.

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.

Then there’s Nimbus Sans, which is indistinguishable from Helvetica; DejaVu Sans, which as far as I can tell is a descendant of Frutiger (and, hence, a cousin of [Apple’s] Myriad and [Microsoft’s] Segoe UI), and makes a nice all-around system font; and Libertine, which makes for a great general-purpose body serif. Once you set these as the fonts in GNOME and in Firefox, everything looks scores better — better than Ubuntu’s default look, certainly, and arguably better than Windows.