Font rendering in recent distro's

[wilbertnl]

In a few threads here we have had discussions about and screenshots of fonts in linux distro's.
We feel a desire to dedicate a seperate discussion to font rendering, so let's get started.

Here is a screenshot of Mandriva 2010.0 free KDE. I noticed that in /etc/fonts/conf.available any reference to hinting style is missing, so I created a 10-hinting-slight.conf and symlinked that to /etc/fonts/conf.d.
After that I recreated the font cache with # fc-cache -rvs.
I selected the Dejavu family as system and firefox font.

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[wilbertnl]

As reference, here is my Windows XP cleartype setting:

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[iceni60]

i've always used this -
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="autohint" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
<const>none</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
<const>hintfull</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

and then checked the dpi are 96x96 by running this -
xdpyinfo | grep resolution

i like Luxi Sans, some of the Lucida fonts, MgOpen Cosmetica Bold for theme titlebars and Lucida Console Bold for the terminal :D

[Mrkvonic]

I'm such an unsophisticated man ... :)

But Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and Droid Sans Mono feel great.

Cheers,
Mrk

[aigle]

I like font of Win 7. Is there a similar one for ubuntu?

[Mrkvonic]

That would be Tahoma or Colibri, I think.
Mrk

[Eice]

-{ Quote: "I like font of Win 7. Is there a similar one for ubuntu?" }-
Segoe UI is the font used in Vista/7. Just grab the font files from your Windows partition and install them in Ubuntu.

[wilbertnl]

I had no idea that the elsewhere mentioned Droid Sans fonts are installed by default in OpenSUSE 11.2.

Here Droid Sans Mono with slight hinting and disabled sub-pixel rendering:

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[Mrkvonic]

Lovely eh? My choice for fonts in terminals - that or ... yes, you guessed, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono :)
Mrk

[wilbertnl]

Yeah, I should tar them up for other distro's. ;-)

[Sputnik]

@wilbertnl
You can use the link below to get the latest version of the free part of the Droid font family at any time.
http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/frameworks/base.git;a=snapshot;h=39b04dd27e6d20809f8ff26920d1e761a0005252;sf=tgz

[Sputnik]

Here's openSUSE 11.2 x86_64 with modified 'cairo' and 'cairo-32bit' packages with full hinting enabled.

[wilbertnl]

OpenSUSE forum: Subpixel Hinting for 11.2- GTK Apps- Solution (http://forums.opensuse.org/applications/425534-subpixel-hinting-11-2-gtk-apps-solution.html#post2065873).
Subpixel enabled library: http://opensuse-community.org/SubpixelHinting

Hinting Full:

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[Sputnik]

@wilbertnl
Looking good Wilbert! ;) My patched cairo libraries are from the subpixel repo:
http://opensuse-community.org/subpixel/openSUSE_11.2/
We're looking into patches and see if we can bake any better libraries our own. Till now I'm already very satisfied too be honest.