A few days ago I made yet another tweak to my Ubuntu laptop to make the fonts look a little better. The result is that I'm now quite happy--impressed even. Here are the three things I've done to make my day-to-day work easy on the eye.

First, enable subpixel smoothing in the System > Appearance control panel.

For a long time that's all I had done was was reasonably happy. Things looked okay but not great. But I used GNU Emacs for most of my coding and wanted fonts there that looked at good as those in gnome terminal.

That led me to the second tip: install emacs-snapshot and use the GTK version. Then you can add this to your ~/.Xresources file:

Emacs.font: Monospace-10

And bingo! The same font that's in your terminal is in Emacs.

That made me happy in Emacs, but my Firefox fonts were still a bit sucky. So when I read Tweak Your Font Rendering for Better Appearance in Tombuntu, I had to give it a try.

I created a ~/.fonts.conf file and added this to it:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"> <fontconfig> <match target="font"> <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"> <bool>true</bool> </edit> </match> </fontconfig>

I logged out and back in and suddnely found myself staring at fonts in Firefox that looked as good as I've seen in Safari on a Mac.

That's all there was to it for me: subpixel rendering, emacs-snapshot, and enabling hinting via a .fonts.conf file.

It's worth noting that you can go even farther with the advanced font settings, but I really haven't needed to go that far yet.

Posted by jzawodn at October 22, 2008 08:57 AM