[xubuntu-users] My Xfce fonts looks bad

[rl.ward at bigpond.com]

---- Tong Sun <xubuys.xpt at spamgourmet.com> wrote: 
> Hi,
> 
> I normally don't use Xfce desktop but launch into my fluxbox WM
> instead. One of ther reason is that the fonts really look bad in Xfce.
> Today, I did a comparison and post the result to
> 
> http://ibin.co/1jrTsjo6hRdS:
> 
> There are three windows from the clip, the File manger, Terminal, and
> a xterm session. I think the File manger and Terminal are both using
> the same font rendering method, and they both look not as crisp as
> xterm. Moreover, you can see that xterm's font size is even smaller
> than both of them, yet crystal clear. If you look closely, you can see
> that on the Terminal, in the content of ~/.Xclients, the dash in
> "$HOME/.Xclients-$HOSTNAME$DISPLAY" is not even rendered. This is a
> 1:1 screenshot that looks exactly like what's showing on my screen.
> I.e., the missing of that dash in not from the screenshot but from
> original Xfce display instead.
> 
> Some people might not tell the difference or might not think it is
> *that* bad, but if you are used to the crystal clear fonts (like that
> from xterm) for over two decades, then you might understand that such
> blurry font rendering is unacceptable to me.
> 
> Any one can help?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> -- 
>

I can appreciate your decision.  However I have not had a similar experience and found that I could improve on the appearance of fonts considerably when I swapped from XP to XUbuntu. Generally the Aliasing and overall rendering was much better than XP.

I was also very pleased to be able to re-cycle most of my MS Font collection to XUbuntu by simply copying the font files across to a .fonts folder in my home directory.  This gave me ample fonts to choose from and experiment with. I was pleased with the results, but tend to use the core Ubuntu fonts for anything that requires long sessions and low eye fatigue.

The fonts that look bad in your first two examples appear to be from the days of bitmap fonts rather than the scalable outline fonts we expect today.  Can you try other fonts (that you are confident have good definition files) on the file manager and terminal? eg the same one as used in the x-term session?

Cheers, Rob