Font rendering in recent distro's

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.

 

As reference, here is my Windows XP cleartype setting:

 

i've always used this -

Code:

<?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

 

I'm such an unsophisticated man ...

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

Cheers,
Mrk

 

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

 

That would be Tahoma or Colibri, I think.
Mrk

 

Segoe UI is the font used in Vista/7. Just grab the font files from your Windows partition and install them in Ubuntu.

 

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:

 

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

 

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

 

@wilbertnl
You can use the link below to get the latest version of the free part of the Droid font family at any time.

Code:

http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=platform/frameworks/base.git;a=snapshot;h=39b04dd27e6d20809f8ff26920d1e761a0005252;sf=tgz

 

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

 

OpenSUSE forum: Subpixel Hinting for 11.2- GTK Apps- Solution.
Subpixel enabled library: http://opensuse-community.org/SubpixelHinting

Hinting Full:

 

@wilbertnl
Looking good Wilbert! My patched cairo libraries are from the subpixel repo:

Code:

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.