Font Display Issues

[neiby]

I like a lot of what I see in 8.10 (or should I say KDE4? I don't know!) One thing I don't like is the way fonts look on my screen. They are uneven, even across a single character. It's as if the line weight (is that the right term?) is not consistent throughout each letter. It's rather annoying to see a whole page of that.

It also seems like all the characters on my screen are a little fuzzy. I tried increasing the sharpening in my nVidia control panel, but that didn't help and honestly made things look worse.

Also, I downloaded the mscore fonts but did not see the Microsoft Sans Serif font, which I find to actually be very pleasing for general text while browsing. I switched to Arial while using Kubuntu, but it just doesn't look right.

Is this an actual display problem or is it a problem with the fonts themselves? I just don't know, but I know that the fonts look quite a bit better in Windows.

Any ideas about how to get better looking fonts and to sharpen things up a bit?

[blackpaw]

Re: Font Display Issues

What video card are you using?
Do you have the restricted drivers installed (NVidia/ATI)
Do you have font smoothing enabled?
Is your screen DPI correct ?

xdpyinfo | grep reso

Should be 96x96

[neiby]

Re: Font Display Issues

I have a nVidia 7900 GS using the proprietary drivers. However, running that command shows me that my dpi is set to 75x75. How do I change that? Is that an xorg.conf setting?

[neiby]

Re: Font Display Issues

I found how to change this using the DisplaySize setting in xorg.conf. I changed it to 96x96 and it looks a little different. I don't know that I'd say it looks better, but definitely different!

[neiby]

Re: Font Display Issues

Interestingly, I notice that I'm having a far more difficult time getting the fonts in Firefox to look good. I just launched Konqueror for grins and the fonts in there seemed to look better. I'm disappointed in general with how bad Firefox looks in Kubuntu. It's pretty nasty. It reminds me of a Windows 95 program.

It could be worse, though. I launched Synaptic on here and it looked like a Windows 3.1 program! Holy cow, it was bad. It must be a very old version of Synaptic or something. It certainly looked really bad compared to the one I'm used to seeing in another distro.

[blackpaw]

Re: Font Display Issues

I'm surprised that DisplaySize worked - it normally doesn't for the nvidia drivers, have you double checked with "xdpyinfo" ?

I'd add the following to the Device section in xorg.conf:

Option "noedid" "true"
Option "dpi" 96x96"

Cheers - Lindsay

[neiby]

Re: Font Display Issues

I'll remove the DisplaySize line and add what you suggested and see how it goes. Thanks!

[neiby]

Re: Font Display Issues

I forgot to check to verify what the other changes did, but I did verify that it is now running at 96x96. I don't know that it really looks that much better, but at least we know it's at the right setting now. I'll poke around a bit and look at a few different pages to see what I think.

Thanks!

[blackpaw]

Re: Font Display Issues

Xpost! didn't notice the firefox thing. Firefox/Thunderbird do look a bit crap under kubuntu. Have you got the following installed?

thunderbird-gnome-support 
firefox-gnome-support 
latex-xft-fonts

Also in systemsettings|Appearance|Fonts
* Enable and set "Force Fonts DPI" to 96
* Enable "Use AntiAliasing"
- Enable "Use Sub Pixel Rendering" : RGB
- Set Hinting Style to "Medium"


You'll need to restart X after that.

[neiby]

Re: Font Display Issues

I have none of those packages installed. Should I install them?

[blackpaw]

Re: Font Display Issues

Yes, they set up more KDE friendly font styles for them.

[neiby]

Re: Font Display Issues

Okay, I installed those packages and changed those settings you suggested. Firefox still pretty much looks like crap. It seems like there is a HUGE variation in the way programs look when using unix/linux. Some look fantastic, while others looks like they haven't been updated in a decade.

[blackpaw]

Re: Font Display Issues

My last suggestion is to change the fonts in Firefox to match Konquerors, on my PC its "DejaVu Sans" and "DejaVu Sans Mon"

Other than that I'm all tapped out Sorry I couldn't help any more than that

Cheers,


Lindsay

[The Liquidator]

Re: Font Display Issues

Not at my Linux box right now but if you go into system settings/ appearance/fonts you can firstly configure the way KDE looks. If you are dual-booting you can install the windows fonts there too.

Also, there is an option in there to make your GTK applications use the same settings. You should notice a significant improvement in the way apps like FF and TB look after that.

Ian

[neiby]

Re: Font Display Issues

I don't know that much about GTK other than that it always looks really bad. lol It always reminds me of Windows 3.1 or the old CDE environment I used to use sometimes with HP/UX. It looked awful. It seems odd to me that linux environments are just now graphically catching up to Windows 98 in some respects.