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Comment by jbarham | Hacker News Reader

> I am getting tired of the way that Ubuntu is focusing so much on getting its fonts right

FWIW I tried to install Ubuntu on my wife's laptop and the main thing that made her go back to Windows was the look of the fonts. So I think Canonical is right to focus on polishing up things that can attract non-technical users.

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This is shocking to me. Windows font rendering isn't even close to what Ubuntu-packaged cairo/freetype is capable of, especially on high-DPI screens. Or perhaps she didn't like the fonts themselves? In that case you could have copied a bunch of Windows fonts, for instance Consolas looks absolutely gorgeous under FreeType.

I applaud Ubuntu for their font efforts. They were the first distro to package non-crippled FreeType (main reason why so many people believed that "linux fonts are ugly"). Thanks to Canonical, mainstream Linux now has the best font rendering of the 3 by far (windows/osx/linux).

It's not shocking to me: people often get used to something, and anything different is "wrong." It can take to adjust to something, even when it's better.

How is FreeType intrinsically better than the Windows font renderer? Microsoft has the advantage of subpixel font rendering (aka ClearType) although admittedly that because it's patented (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering#Patents).

Because FreeType does it too, in fact FreeType employs every single trick there is: bytecode interpreter, hinting, subpixel rendering, etc. But it has an advantage of being configurable i.e. it doesn't follow "all size fits all" path. Slight hinting + subpixel smoothing with enabled bytecode interpretation yields incredible output on high-DPI screens.

However, IIRC there's a Microsoft-made utility that allows you to tinker with ClearType settings making it more high-DPI friendly as well (doesn't come with Windows but search for it on their site)

I think the tool comes with Windows, at least Windows 7. I recently installed Windows 7 and could tinker with how Cleartype looks right away. It's a quite nice interface, you get six different example texts and repeatedly click on which looks best to you.

I don't know how Ubuntu does that but if it doesn't do it like that it already lost by default. In the unlikely case that normal users stumble upon the adjustment tool they might even click on what they like best. They will never diddle with knobs or checkboxes.

It has the cost of being highly configurable. I could make the same font (Verdana) look much better on Linux than on Windows, by fiddling with dpi/hinting/subpixel rendering settings. And I could make it look worse. It was much easier to make it look worse. I had to spend a lot of time fiddling with the settings until I hit the jackpot.

FreeType has enabled the bytecode interpreter; those patents have all expired.

http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

Unless you are talking about a different set of patents.

Looks like it is too late to edit my own comment. There are indeed two bunches of patents: Apple's (bytecode interpreter) have expired, but Microsoft's (ClearType's subpixel rendering method) have not.

I've always preferred Window's font rendering because its very readable on a low DPI screen, which is most of the screens out there.

You can't possibly prefer Windows font rendering simply because FreeType can be configured to render exactly the same output. What Ubuntu ships by default is drop dead gorgeous on high-DPI screens and really nice on regular monitors, but you can configure it to render text indistinguishable from Windows. ArchLinux has alternative "clear type cairo/freetype" packages that are just that.

My wife wants to switch to windows because certain basic things just don't work in a multi-user/fast-user-switching Ubuntu setup. The wireless applet (nm-applet) is plain broken (bug 284596). Audio doesn't work if the previously logged-in user was playing something. Some of these problems have been known for a while.

you're absolutely right - but ugly fonts were fixable even previously. I used Droid or even Calibri from my Windows 7 install.

I dont think there have been any changes in font rendering itself (which is the main cause of Linux fonts looking bad compared to Win7 or OSX) - rather, just a new font.

But suspend/resume ? I just cant fix it - it is so bad that I have started believing in Linux suspend/resume being sentient (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1613621)

Most modern fonts are designed to work around limitations of the display medium. It even seems reasonable you could design a font to account for a bad display algorithm.

What version did you try? I found that 10.04 was the first version with fonts that actually look good.

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