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Comment by dchest | Hacker News Reader

How do you get Ubuntu-like subpixel antialiasing in Fedora?

The lack of this is the primary reason I don't consider running Fedora over Ubuntu. Shallow, perhaps, but when you stare at a computer screen all day, good font rendering matters.

There is a guy who maintains a set of Fedora packages with versions of Cairo and Xft with the relevant patches for that beautiful font rendering: http://www.infinality.net/blog/?p=5

I've always been reluctant to jump to Fedora and rely on this guy to keep up his work, though.

EDIT: Looks like this guy already has these patched packages (and some Freetype tweaks too) ready for Fedora 14, see his most recent post.

I still really wish this would get out of the "some dude has to patch it in" territory and just become the standard font rendering configuration for Linux distros besides Ubuntu.

Thanks! I actually tried installing these, but haven't noticed the warning that it shouldn't be configured via gnome-appearance-properties.

I had never heard that there was a difference before reading your comment, so I did a web search for "ubuntu font rendering", and most of the results are something like "How to fix Ubuntu's terrible, ugly, blurry font rendering." It's interesting how much people's preferences vary on this subject.

Is the patch that Legion refers to the same one that's in Ubuntu, or is that something else?

In what applications do you see a difference? I've spent some time looking quite closely at Firefox's font rendering in Fedora vs. Ubuntu and didn't notice any differences.

I already applied the patch, so can't show the difference between unpatched Fedora and Ubuntu, but you can see it yourself.

Open this page: http://www.infinality.net/files/font.html, set the font to "DejaVu Sans", and scroll down to 14px.

Compare to these screenshots:

- Fedora 14, patched as above: http://imgur.com/Y2JV1.png

- Ubuntu 10.10, default: http://imgur.com/2WgdM.png

- Mac OS X 10.6.4, Firefox: http://imgur.com/KGK7T.png

I'd appreciate if someone posted screenshots of this page with default unpatched Fedora config, and with unpatched subpixel-enabled Fedora.

This is from Fedora 13 (not 14, sorry), with subpixel hinting, without the patch: http://i.imgur.com/whG3S.png

Comparing it to your patched F14 version, the roman typefaces look quite different, but overall I can't say I prefer one to the other. The italics, on the other hand, look much better in your version.

There is one strange thing in your F14 screenshot, though--the upper left of the lowercase letter 'a' is straight horizontal, rather than curving down as it does in all the other screenshots, both yours and mine.

Your Ubuntu screenshot looks very similar to your F14 screenshot, but not quite identical: see the dots on the lowercase i, and the above-mentioned problem with the lowercase a.

Thanks!

Personally I can't really tell the difference, but I'm guessing this is the patented hinting algorithm? If so, Fedora can't ship it, because Red Hat is a large US-based target with lots of money. However rpmfusion is available for those of us in the free world:

http://rpmfusion.org/

AFAIK, those patents expired a year ago or so.

Fedora has some subpixel antialiasing http://imgur.com/gVPXP .

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