Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

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.


> 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


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.


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


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

agreed ;)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: