Horrid fonts in Feisty

[Rashkae]

Kirk Strauser wrote:
> I noticed that most fonts on my newly-updated Kubuntu/Feisty system look 
> pretty awful, as though they were both subpixel- and greyscale-antialiased 
> at the same time.  I ran "dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config" to make sure 
> nothing too wild was set up, and eventually removed my ~/.fonts.conf file 
> to remove any possible conflicts there.  The end results were absolutely 
> awful:
> 
>     http://www.honeypot.net/~kirk/feisty-ugly-fonts.png
> 
> I remember the pre-antialiasing days all too well, but I also know that 
> fonts didn't look *that* bad even then.  Is there anything I should look at 
> to make my system look less awful, with the hope that re-enabling 
> antialiasing after the glitches are worked out will make it look really 
> good once again?

Hmm, your fonts do look worse for wear than Default Feisty should look.. 
I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't have a solution to your exact problem.. 
but I would be happy to share my overall system font tips that make 
Linux look *great*.

The first thing needed are TTF fonts with good hinting,, Sadly, this 
means MS fonts.. I like good ol' fashioned Arial myself,, but if the 
only thing you can legally get are the MS web core fonts, Verdana makes 
a good second.

You need a fontconfig that supports hinting *and* bitmapped fonts... The 
powers that be have decided that Debian (and Ubuntu) ships with 
bitmapped  fonts disabled.  I think that's a terrible mistake, and I'll 
share why with screenshots :)  You can change the fontconfig in Ubuntu 
with "sudo fontconfig-config"

Although I generally set my Gnome, KDE and Firefox preference to use my 
chosen fonts, if you have Arial or Verdana installed, you can change the 
default sans fonts to one of them with a /etc/fonts/local.conf entry 
like this:
         <alias>
                 <family>sans-serif</family>
                 <prefer>
                         <family>Arial</family>
                 </prefer>
         </alias>


         <alias>
                 <family>serif</family>
                 <prefer>
                         <family>Times New Roman</family>
                 </prefer>
         </alias>

Oh, I also disable Webpages from specifying their own fonts on Firefox

And lastly, having re-enabled bitmapped fonts, I set the font for my 
Consoles and E-mail (Plain text e-mails, at least) as "Fixed", which is 
a bitmapped font.. (You many need to install KDE to get this in Feisty, 
I'm not sure at the moment).


Personally, I despise anti-alised text.. I realize that's a personal 
thing that puts me in the minority, but when looking these screenshots, 
please keep in mind that these are *without* any anti-aliasing.. I think 
they look great on LCD like this.

Screenshots are at http://www.tigershaunt.com/files/screen/