How to greatly improve the sharpness/clarity of Kubuntu's fonts, lines, images?

[RLynwood]

Hello, all,

Recently having installed Kubuntu 14.10, Plasma4, on my main hdd, I find that I really like it; there's a lot to like. I especially like the window's and mouse pointer's responsiveness. What I can't understand, however, is the terrible fonts--almost everywhere. As much as I don't like Unity because of its hiding all modifiers, making it really difficult to customize, I love its really sharp, clear fonts and image lines, better than any other version of Ubuntu, including the Mints. I've tried all of these on the exact same hardware, so that's not it. Can Kubuntu's font and line sharpness be made to match Unity's? If so, how?

Ray

[dtr]

Go to: System Settings - Application Appearance - Fonts
There you can change the fonts, enable/configure anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rendering, and force font DPI to whatever you prefer.

For my laptop, I have anti-aliasing enable, with sub-pixel rendering set to RGB, Hinting style: Medium. and because the screen is 1920x1200, I changed my DPI to 132 (there is a formula to get the correct DPI but I can't remember what it is right now.). I also adjust some font sizes and prefer Oxygen-Sans font.

Hope this might help.

[RLynwood]

This sounds awfully technical to me, but I'll try it. I wouldn't know what to choose for sub-pixel rendering or DPI, and I can't imagine why anti-aliasing wouldn't be enabled by default. (I don't understand what anti-aliasing is, but I've read comments about it years ago, when virtually unanimous commentary about it favored it.) I looked at the fonts a while ago and did see Oxygen-Sans, but it looked awfully fat. I don't see anything wrong with Ubuntu's font, provided it looks as it does in Unity, which is sharp and clear. Still, I'll try your suggestions. Thanks for them. This is a start. Frankly, the fonts I see are so bad that, in my proselytizing nature, I'd be embarrassed to show a Windows person, let alone a Mac person, my Kubuntu (and its frustrating for me). What makes it so bad is that the letters are dark gray rather than black, they seem unevenly thick, kind of fuzzy, and the extremely uneven white backgrounding seems to shadow the letters, making them look unevenly colored. Is this normal? And, more to the point, why isn't it sharp and clear by default, especially given how old and otherwise highly polished KDE is.

[RLynwood]

Btw, re. my DPI, my monitor's max resolution is 1680x1050, and I'm happy with 96. Any suggestion for darkening the print? I've tried None, Medium, and Full hinting styles and can't tell any difference between them. What is that (I've looked it up and don't see an explanation of it)?

[SecretCode]

That's interesting - when I first tried Kubuntu (from Ubuntu before the opening of the pit of despair that is Unity), I was pleasantly surprised with the graphical and font sharpness.

That doesn't help you, of course, but it means you should be able to get good results.

One thing that might be important is to get the right video driver. What video adapter hardware do you have?

[RLynwood]

Right now it's the one built into my Asus Gryphon Z87 main board, and I believe it defaults to the i7-4790 processor for graphical rendering. I'm not sure how that works. But, the hardware is constant, and I have a multi-boot system. Booting into Ubuntu-Unity, I see clear, sharp fonts, lines, edges, etc., and booting into my newly installed Kubuntu/Plasma4 (in the new computer but with the old hdd, which contains the installed OSs), I get less clear, sharp/black fonts.

[RLynwood]

But, btw, the fonts in Kubuntu now are better than they were before I made some of the adjustments that I forgot who directed me to make. So, at least they're better now. I'm going to reboot into Unity again to check and then also boot into a live DVD of Mint-KDE to see how they look.

[SecretCode]

Have you run "Driver Manager" to check for possible proprietary drivers that could improve it?

[RLynwood]

No, but I just did. It yielded nothing, just a blank window. But, again, the drivers are in the kernel, which should be essentially the same in Ubuntu-Unity and Kubuntu/Plasma4, shouldn't they?

[RLynwood]

That's interesting - when I first tried Kubuntu (from Ubuntu before the opening of the pit of despair that is Unity), I was pleasantly surprised with the graphical and font sharpness.

That doesn't help you, of course, but it means you should be able to get good results.

One thing that might be important is to get the right video driver. What video adapter hardware do you have?

If your despair in using Unity derived from its lack of easy configurability, I share that completely, but that's an entirely different issue from their font rendering. But you said that you were pleasantly surprised by KDE's greater font clarity. How long ago was that, how many upgrades ago? I don't know this, but I suspect that Unity has improved considerably over time.

[SecretCode]

I think it tends to be hardware specific. But your hardware seems to be covered.

[SteveRiley]

Might we see some screen shots?

[RLynwood]

Yeah, good idea. But it'll have to wait till a bit later. I have a bunch of things to do today.

[RLynwood]

You can't see the fonts in this shot as I can in Gwenview. What am I doing wrong? This image makes the fonts I'm concerned about look just fine, but in Gwenview, which shows it accurately, the fonts in the terminal are sharp and clear (as is the one in this forum display), and that in the background text (Wikipedia) is fine, though not nearly as sharp as that in the terminal, no doubt because of the contrast. My problem is with the fonts in the task bar and menu and tool bars and tabs, where the letters are thin, not very dark and on a darkish gray background, and virtually ghosted out by the uneven white backgrounding, and to a lesser extent even in the K Menu. Perhaps there's a better theme that shows those fonts sharply, as the Radiance one in Unity. Hmm, I don't see a place in the System Settings for changing themes; where's that?

[SecretCode]

The forum may resize large images. Try taking a crop of the screen areas highlighting the good and bad bits.
Also. save as .png because jpg introduces compression which will mask sharpness anyway!