Fixing Font Resolution In Epiphany

After recently scheduling a large client upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06 to Ubuntu 8.04, a number of people started complaining that fonts looked bad on the web browsers (Epiphany).

Although they all had video cards (nVidia) and monitors (Samsung SyncMaster's) in common -- a bit of Googling indicated an underlying software issue.

Fortunately, this is easy to fix.

If you open a web browser and type about:config into the location bar, which should take you to the configuration screen -- consisting of a filter box and a larger portion containing all of the relevant tweakable parameters.

In the filter textbox type: layout.css.dpi it should be a Default, Integer value (that is not bold) that looks like the screen below:



Now, if you right-click the bold text and select modify you should get a textbox appear in the center of the screen, simply use the keyboard or mouse to select and remove the -1 and enter either 70 (if you have a resolution lower than 1024x768) or 92 (resolutions of 1024x768 or higher) instead -- and press OK to return to the configuration menu.

At this point, the screen should look like the one below:



Now you can close the browser, the next time you restart it -- your fonts should look smoother and more readable.

edit: If you find that you can't edit the text-box on an OpenSUSE 11.0RC1 or Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 installation, try forcefully closing Epiphany by typing the following command in a terminal window:

killall -9 epiphany-browser && rm ~/.gnome2/epiphany/mozilla/epiphany/!lock

and then try to modify it again.

Better TTF fonts for LCD devices

A small follow-up to my last post -- because after you've installed your fonts, you'd probably like them to look good.

note: In some countries, the use of hinting is covered by patents -- which is why some distributions don't ship this functionality by default (prefering instead to use an auto-hinter included within the Freetype 2.x code specifically designed to completely ignore the TrueType bytecode instructions) -- still, you should use caution when modifying a production system -- caveat emptor.

First, you need to make sure you are actually using the native renderer, rather than the auto-hinter for your fonts -- in Ubuntu you can do this by opening a Terminal and typing:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config

On the first screen, you need to select 'native' rather than 'autohinter' -- you can safely leave the other screens as their default values.

Second, you'll need to change your theme to use the better hinting -- you can do this on Ubuntu in the Font preferences from: System > Preferences > Appearance and select Fonts tab.

On the first screen, select the 'Details' button in the bottom right-hand-corner -- which will take you to a more detailed menu where you can customise your font and rendering preferences -- the key options to set here are:

Smoothing to Subpixel (LCDs),
Hinting to Slight
Subpixel Order to RGB. (Should be the default already)

At this point, instead of having something like:



You'll have:



Which, I think you'll agree -- looks much better (and is much easier to read, too)

Installing TTF fonts in Linux

Recently, I was asked how to get downloaded fonts onto an Ubuntu workstation in order to make prettier documents in OpenOffice -- there's two methods to doing this, which I thought i'd document for anyone having difficulties doing it themselves.

This article works on a Fedora 8, an Ubuntu 7.10 and an Ubuntu 6.06 machine -- but mainly relies on an XFree86 4.2 (or later) install with the fontconfig package installed (most current distributions have this installed already).

Method One: Single-user Fonts

Individual Users can install fonts by opening a terminal (Accessories -> Terminal) and making a .fonts directory in their home directory, like:

mkdir -p .fonts

Then, find a TTF font you like (Google thinks here is a good place to start looking) -- download it, extract it (fonts are usually distributed in .zip archives, so you'll need to extract the .ttf font file from it first) and copy it to the .fonts directory you just made.

Then you can either logout and login again, or restart the application you want the fonts to appear in and they should appear for use.

Method Two: System-wide Fonts

Administrators can install fonts by opening a terminal (Accessories -> Terminal), becoming the root user using either:

su - (Fedora)

or:

sudo -s (Ubuntu)

Then making a specific directory in the font location on their machine for TTF fonts (usually /usr/share/fonts/truetype), like:

mkdir -p /usr/share/fonts/truetype/winfonts

Download and extract the fonts to the new winfonts directory you made above, then update the font cache information for the machine by typing:

fc-cache -f -v

note: Some older Linux distributions (Fedora Core 3 and KUbuntu 5.04 both need this) may need to run:

mkfontscale && mkfontdir as the root user before running the fc-cache command above, so that your machine correctly creates a fonts.dir file that can be found by fc-cache.

If you're interested in Free and Open Sourced fonts, you should look at Ed Trager's site on the subject.