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State of Font Rendering on Linux

Hi folks,

I was wondering what people’s thoughts are on the state of font rendering on Linux and if there are any important settings/packages I might not be aware of.

I’ve never been particularly font sensitive. So despite being a long time user at this point… I’m still a Linux fonts noob. However, I know a lot of people are big into fonts.

I recently installed Debian KDE as a desktop for my father. He likes it, but he wasn’t crazy about the fonts. We turned the normal subpixel rendering on in KDE Font settings, but some pages definitely had blocky looking fonts (e.g. the Yahoo home page my dad still uses 🙃).

Any tips? The documentation in this area seems to be lacking… and maybe it’s just the resolution of the mintors and things (my dad had gotten used to his high resolution phone so jumping back to a 28" 1080p monitor is going to look blocky no matter what). Regardless, if there are any tips or things I might have missed, they’d be much appreciated!

d3Xt3r , (edited )

You can use this font.conf to improve your font rendering: gist.github.com/…/e2ee6661899f405781dbce54ae23115…

Save it to ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf. Then install all the font packages mentioned in the comments. Finally, run fc-cache and/or reboot your system to apply the changes.

Note that this isn’t a magical fix, you may still need to tweak the hinting/aliasing/subpixel rendering etc based on your monitor, resolution, DPI, and personal preference. Check out this page for more details on how to tweak this + some troubleshooting tips: wiki.archlinux.org/title/font_configuration

Dark_Arc OP ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

Wow, that’s a lot of tweaks!

RiderExMachina ,

Blocky fonts could just be Yahoo falling back to older fonts as it finds the Windows/MacOS fonts not installed on the local system. The easiest thing you could do to verify this is install the mscorefonts (the way to install it changes every few years, so you’ll need to search it).

vividspecter ,

You probably don’t need the ms core fonts exactly, as long as there are compatible replacements installed. But that’s a simple enough starting point, agreed.

RiderExMachina ,

Correct, the mscorefonts may be a little overkill, but it would be the quickest solution. My guess is that Debian’s default fonts “aren’t up to par”, so they could also download and install other fonts and use them as the default san-serif font, but unless they got lucky it could take longer than just installing the fonts their father knows and loves.

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