Fonts all thin and spidery

[blackpaw]

I did a fresh install of 12.10 last night (SSD boot - awesome!). Pretty smooth on the whole, but most text - menus, kmail etc looks very thin and spidery. This is with the stock Ubuntu fonts and others such as my favoirite, Bistream Vera Sans.

I have Antialising enabled (medium stroke).

Using nvidia-current (have tried updates as well). Effects etc all working well.

It almost looks like antialiasing isn't working

[lucazade]

post a screenshot plz!

[blackpaw]

Done!

[Snowhog]

The fonts look fine to me.

[pauly]

Make sure exclude range isn't check marked under configure.

[Snowhog]

In Fonts > Configure... > Exclude range is not marked, Use sub-pixel rendering: RGB is selected, and Hinting style: Medium is being used here.

[Shimapan]

If you think your fonts look too thin, then your sub-pixel hinting is set too high.
It's set to "Medium" by default, which is too much in my opinion, so I have set it to "Slight", and fonts look much better

In the Fonts > Configure Dialog, set "Hinting style" to "Slight". "Exclude range" should be unchecked. The setting will be applied to newly started applications immediately, but you will need to log out and log in again to apply it to all applications.

btw, when posting screenshots, it would be much better if you don't scale them down to tiny 640 pixels - you can hardly make out anything on that screenshot. Also, using an image hoster like Imgbox would be better, so you can have bigger thumbnails instead of these literally thumbnail-sized micro-thumbnails that are generated for attachments.

[blackpaw]

Thanks for the suggestions folks, I'll try them out.

btw, when posting screenshots, it would be much better if you don't scale them down to tiny 640 pixels - you can hardly make out anything on that screenshot. Also, using an image hoster like Imgbox would be better, so you can have bigger thumbnails instead of these literally thumbnail-sized micro-thumbnails that are generated for attachments.

sorry about that, it was a full image on my disk, the upload to the forum seemed to shrink it.

[blackpaw]

Exclude range was unchecked, hinting was "Medium". I changed to to slight, restarted and that was a big improvment. Thought I'd tested that before but obviously not

Thanks everyone.

[SteveRiley]

My typical routine...

1. Install kipi-plugins.
2. Take snapshot with PrtSc.
3. Click Send To, then choose Export to Imgur.
4. In the export dialog, click Upload
5. In the export dialog, double-click the URL that appears in the Imgur URL column.
6. A new browser window or tab will open. Right-click the entry under BBCode and choose Copy.
7. Paste the clipboard contents into the forum post.

[blackpaw]

Very smooth, I use ksnapshot normally but have never looked at the export facility before, thanks for that. This is where KDE is so far ahead of everyone else.

[SteveRiley]

Very smooth, I use ksnapshot normally but have never looked at the export facility before, thanks for that. This is where KDE is so far ahead of everyone else.

You're welcome. Indeed, so many neat things in KDE.

Sometimes I have to make a detour, if I want to modify the image:

1. Install kipi-plugins.
2. Take snapshot with PrtSc.
3. Click Save As to save the file.
3a. Open the file in Gwenview to crop and/or resize.
3b. In the Gwenview menu, choose Plugins | Export | Export to Imgur
4. In the export dialog, click Upload
5. In the export dialog, double-click the URL that appears in the Imgur URL column.
6. A new browser window or tab will open. Right-click the entry under BBCode and choose Copy.
7. Paste the clipboard contents into the forum post.

[Shimapan]

You're welcome. Indeed, so many neat things in KDE.

Sometimes I have to make a detour, if I want to modify the image:

1. Install kipi-plugins.
2. Take snapshot with PrtSc.
3. Click Save As to save the file.
3a. Open the file in Gwenview to crop and/or resize.
...

That's unneccessarily complicated
There's no point to use Gwenview just to crop the screenshot.

1. Take screenshot with PrtScr
2. For the screenshot mode in Ksnapshot, select "Rectangular area". (This will be remembered next time Ksnapshot is launched).
3. Click on "New screenshot". You will be able to select a rectangular area with your mouse. After roughly selecting the area, the size can be finetuned precisely. The exact dimensions will be shown in the centre of the selection. Hit Enter or double-click when finished.

There are also some other screenshot modes which may also come in handy (e.g. the active window under the mouse), just take a look.

[SteveRiley]

Yeah, you're right about cropping, no need for the extra steps. I find I'm more often resizing anyway, and here's where you have to make the pass through Gwenview. Or if you want to edit the image -- say draw a red circle around something -- then through KolourPaint, too. The point is, that Kipi Plugins thing is neet, and its integration with KSnapshot and Gwenview is convenient.