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Comment by Scarbutt | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I know you can make fonts look nice in linux, but distros ship with horrible defaults.

First, who do you think you are to question my font configuration skills (hint: nil), second, as mentioned earlier, there are ways to have 'better' font rendering. The thing is it requires a PhD in Linux display stack and frankly I don't care. I tried to care though, and it backfired at me (emacs was fubared, and that's a deal breaker), and this default config, even subpar, is pretty enough and stable enough. Lastly, chromium manages to set up itself better and fonts look better in it. SoFTWare.

" The thing is it requires a PhD in Linux display stack "

agreed ;)

> there are ways to have 'better' font rendering. The thing is it requires a PhD in Linux display stack

Not really. Just learning about how to adjust preferences for FontConfig. Antialiasing, hinting and subpixel rendering have a lot of effect on the visual appearance especially. You can read about it here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration#Font...

There can be also some monitor specific tweaks like LCD filtering.

More feature rich DEs give quite easy to use interfaces for managing all that (for example KDE). So if you are using some barebones DE / WM, then you should be ready to do all that manually in the config files.

I did try arch wiki advices, I got some results but I didn't really understand what I was doing and had lots of undesired side-effects (emacs buffer redraw failed, screenshot aliasing failed,...) so I dropped everything and used stock config.

The xml config files seems overly complex (I admit, I suffer from acute xml ad-formatem) for my tastes.

I tried to diff manjaro linux /etc/fontconfig actually, just to see what they were doing right to have such nice visuals and couldn't find anything.

It's in the same basket as some famous audio server, which I replaced by it's very naive ancestor.

On Debian defaults are all under /etc/fonts

About general idea of what all those settings are, here is a brief overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_rasterization

FontConfig rules can even be applied to Web fonts, which at times can be messed up by default. Example of such rule for fixing some mess on DuckDuckGo:

    <match target="font">
      <test name="family">
        <string>@font-face:DDG_ProximaNova</string>
      </test>
      <edit mode="assign" name="autohint">
        <bool>true</bool>
      </edit>
      <edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter">
        <const>lcddefault</const>
      </edit>
    </match>

The difference it made for me (note the word Wikipedia and messed up letter i):

Without the rule: https://i.imgur.com/SsicEFJ.png

With the rule: https://i.imgur.com/Ehh0rZU.png

Thank you, I appreciate the time you took for the screenshots.

I didn't know this worked against web fonts as well. Is there any chance you could share your webfonts config in its entirety? Maybe post it on github or some whee? I'd be hugely grateful :)

That's really the only such setting that I have :) I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine and that messed up i was irritating me a lot, so I was digging for a way to improve the look of Web fonts and discovered that Fontconfig can affect them.

>distros ship with horrible defaults.

I guess you haven't used Ubuntu lately, which ships with better fonts than my Windows machine.

Or, you know, people have different subjective preferences in fonts.

From another comment:

Is not about font taste, is about brokenness, you can clearly see in the screenshot that the fonts are rendered poorly, some letters are lighter than others, half of a letter is lighter than the other half, some don't look smooth, etc...

Yes, to me, Ubuntu has the best defaults.

Fonts configuration is always rather subjective. I often don't like defaults. This applies to any system. Good ones allow greater flexibility. Bad ones assume they know best and force "best defaults" without any way to improve them.

Not sure about that system. I'm using Debian testing and it has very good quality defaults (visually) which I change anyway to suit some of my preferences. So the claim about that "distros ship horrible defaults" is not universally applicable.

Firefox renders text using whatever text rendering settings you have set up on your computer. These differ from platform to platform, and from monitor to monitor. If you don't like sub-pixel rendering, you just turn it off and all the programs on your machine, Firefox included, stop using it.

Others have also mentioned that the subpixel order differs from monitor to monitor, so if the screenshot was taken on a monitor with BGR subpixels and your monitor has RGB subpixels, the text will look much, much, worse than if there had been no subpixel rendering at all. Or perhaps you, like me, have a CRT and subpixel rendering always looks wrong. It's hardly Firefox's fault.

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