[SOLVED] Gnome & Firefox: Fonts are too small

Question

Hi,
I am really used to using firefox in Windows XP where fonts are readable out-of-the-box. By this I mean I didn't have to fiddle with firefox when I installed it, the fonts looked great.
Now that I'm using Gnome, I see that firefox's fonts are really too small. The glyphs are smashed together too. How can I get the fonts to look decent in firefox? I'm not sure if this is an OS-level setting or a firefox-level setting.
Last edited by void.pointer (2009-02-04 04:57:55)

Answer 1

If you have an LCD monitor, try this:
Copy & paste the code below into a file called
.fonts.conf
[NOTE: It's a hidden file ! ]
and save it in your home directory. Log out & in again and fire up The Fox !
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<!-- the cathectic LCD tweaks, from linuxquestions.org,
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?postid=1361098#post1361098 -->
<fontconfig>
<!-- Disable sub-pixel rendering. X detects it anyway, and if you set this as well, it just looks really horrible -->
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
<const>none</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="hinting">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
<const>hintfull</const>
</edit>
</match>
<!-- The first part of the 'magic.' This makes the fonts start to look nice, but some of the shapes will be distorted, so hinting is
needed still -->
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<!-- Autohinter is not turned on automatically. Only disable this if you have recompiled Freetype with the bytecode interpreter, which
is run automatically. Although to be honest, Freetype are right, there isn't much difference between the two. Note that OpenOffice is
built against the bytecode interpreter, so even if you have compiled it and override it with the autohinter, OOo will still use the
bytecode interpreter -->
<match target="pattern" >
<edit mode="assign" name="autohint">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<!-- Helvetica is a non true type font, and will look bad. This replaces it with whatever is the default sans-serif font -->
<match target="pattern" name="family" >
<test name="family" qual="any" >
<string>Helvetica</string>
</test>
<edit mode="assign" name="family" >
<string>sans-serif</string>
</edit>
</match>
<dir>~/.fonts</dir>
</fontconfig>
All credit to LinuxQuestions for this conf file.
Deej