Font rendering and legacy X applications

For some time, I have had problems keeping older applications working well as the X font system evolves. For example, I have many drawings created in Xfig, and the fonts stopped being rendered correctly some time ago. Converting all these files for a new drawing package like Inkscape would be a pain. The other main problem occurs with a commercial CAD package (Eagle), which is statically linked to Qt2, and does not play nicely when anti-aliasing is applied to Qt3/KDE apps.
Xfig and others
The problem here is that Xfig would render fonts with the letters too closely spaced, such that the on-screen representation no longer matches the printed or PDF output. I fixed this by forcing 75 x 75 DPI resolution, rather than using the resolution determined by the X server from probing the monitor. To do this, put a line in the Monitor section of XF86Config or xorg.conf:
DisplaySize 433 347
The above x and y values were calculated for a resolution of 1280 x 1024.
Another fix I have done for Xfig is to patch the sources to pick up the URW font names instead of the Adobe names for the standard Postscript fonts. If anyone is interested, I could make a proper Arch package for this.
Forcing the resolution is admittedly a kludge. I might look into font rendering in an Xlib application, to see if there is some extra code needed to handle the proper resolution correctly.
Gtk-2.0 UI fonts at 75DPI
An unfortunate side effect of forcing 75 x 75 DPI resolution is that the menu and other UI fonts in Gtk apps end up too small. This was noticed on Gvim and Gnumeric. KDE and Qt programmes appear to be unaffected. This can be fixed by creating a .gtkrc-2.0 file in your home directory with the following contents:
gtk-font-name = "Bitstream Vera Sans 12"
Put whatever font and size you like. I have no information on the format of the gtkrc file. The above was adapted from a page found on Google.
Mozilla (which uses Gtk) needs some individual tweaking, as the UI fonts end up far too big. In preferences->fonts, set the resoultion to 72 DPI.
The above measures should only be required if you have forced 75DPI. I had no problems with Gtk apps prior to doing that.
Eagle
The problem with Eagle appears to be related to the fact that it uses Qt2 (statically linked) in a Qt3 environment. This might also occur with other apps, but Eagle is the only one I know about. When antialising is turned on via KDE control center, this modifies .qt/qtrc, and so affects all Qt applications. If I have anti-aliasing turned on, the fonts in Eagle are very ragged and badly spaced.
I fixed this by modifying the font path in XF86Config, to remove the entry /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF. The problem appears to be that Eagle is picking up one of the True Type fonts, instead of a Type 1 or bitmapped font. Turning on antialing in Qt appears to alter its font selection behaviour (fontconfig?) as well as font rendering.
An interesting outcome of experimenting with the font path is that removing entries only affects older applications. KDE and other modern apps work perfectly well with only the mandatory /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc entry present. As far as I know, this is because modern toolkits like Qt3 and Gtk2 use fontconfig to find fonts.

I now made two screenshots of Mail: The first one while the external display was disconnected, the second one when it was connected (and Mail moved to the external display). I opened both screenshots in Photoshop and there was a clear difference between the font renderings: On the screenshot of the internal display, the fonts are smoothed with black and grey pixels only, while on the screenshot from the external display they are smoothed with colored pixels. This is the reason why the text looks so bad on the external one. Therefore, it is definitely a problem of the font rendering. In Photoshop, the difference of font rendering is clearly visible!
See here:
http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/5389/fontt.jpg
The first line is internal display, the second line external display. That's unbelievable.
Another thing: I found out that it's not only Mail that has the problem - it is any application that was started after the external display had been connected. It seems that OS X applies the font rendering setting at the moment a application is starts. When I disconnect the display, start Finder, Mail, Safari and so on, and then connect the display, then all the applications look great even on the external display. When I quit the apps and then restart, the font rendering is broken again

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Creative cloud.exe and legacy fullscreen applications

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I spent upwards of two hours trying to sort this last night and none of the advice on the forums got me there so I gave up and decided to just buy it and download it from the web.
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[SOLVED] Bad font rendering and overlapping since last update

Hi all! Since the last updates I'm getting font rendering problems. I'm seeing something like this in lots of applications:
See the "ce" in Facebook, those letters are kinda overlapped! This happens in Nautilus too, for example in the word "devel". I'm using the Ubuntu patches for font rendering, but actually I have problems even with the stock packages.
I'm on a fresh install right now (I really needed to clean the old one, too much experimenting xD) and I keep having this problem.
Can anyone help me?
SOLVED I downgraded pango from 1.32.1-1 to 1.30.1-1 and everything went back to normality
Last edited by Gianfrix (2012-11-06 14:09:00)

brebs wrote:https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/32612?project=1
That seems to be an issue. Downgrading to xorg-server 1.13.0-3 resolved problem. Watching ticket for future updates. Thanks a lot
Last edited by mamciek (2012-11-20 22:02:58)

Poor text font rendering and display resolution

While I am a software database developer, I know VERY little about HTML/CSS coding.
After updating to Firefox v18 yesterday, the font text rendering seriously degraded! The resolution now is very poor and fuzzy! IE9's resolution is "perfect."
Both browsers are running on a fresh new custom install of Win7-64 where NO special global display config settings have been made.
Since this problem occurred after the FF v18 upgrade and did NOT exist in IE9, it seems as if this problem is specific to Firefox.
After searching Google for several hours now without finding any intuitive-sounding solution nor knowing what to look for, I have posted this request for help in hopes someone will please kindly reply back with a fix.
PS: Sorry for the duplicate post... Had problems with the first submission due to the Email Registration process.

Try to set the gfx.content.azure.enabled pref to false or if this didn't help disable Direct2D by setting the gfx.direct2d.disabled pref to true on the about:config page and leave hardware acceleration otherwise enabled.
*http://kb.mozillazine.org/about:config
You can also try to uninstall Windows update KB2670838 if you have this update.
*http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2670838
*https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Troubleshooting+extensions+and+themes

Firefox/Thunderbird Font Rendering changed after upgrade of xulrunner

Hi guys,
I experienced a problem with font rendering in the mentioned applications after upgrading xulrunner from 1.9.2.10-1 to 1.9.2.10-2 today. It seems like font smoothing/subpixel rendering does not work as before. After downgrading to 1.9.2.10-1, it worked as expected again.
To make it more clearly, here is a comparison shot of the two different renderings. The top one is before, the bottom one after the upgrade. You can see that the font at the top is rendered more smoothly.
And here is a difference image:
Is anything known about changes which could cause this?
<edit>I have to correct this. The rendering in thunderbird was obviously not changed by the xulrunner upgrade, but by a separate thunderbird upgrade from 3.1.4-1 to 3.1.4-2.
<edit2>Additional information: I have the cleartype versions of freetype2, cairo and libxft installed, if that matters.
Last edited by Singul (2010-09-28 16:40:18)

Although I am empathetic to the hard (and really great) job the arch devs do, I want to voice my overall agreement with softtower on this issue. Fonts have been an off and on problem for me with arch since the beginning. I understand the devs are doing the best they can, especially when the actual problem is with the moz. devs. But fonts are the major way most users interact with the system, and I can tell you that almost nothing is more aggravating, to me at least, to suddenly "upgrade" and get presented with those really crappy fonts out of the blue. Just saying I understand the frustration, and I think he makes some good points about shipping broken packages and "blaming" it on upstream. If they're broken - don't use them! if possible. "Progress" that breaks stuff isn't really progress, imo.
hokasch wrote:
Don't quite get what the fuzz is all about, my fonts look as crisp as ever (on a laptop lcd), the update changed absolutely nothing for me. I never used "fixed" versions of anything, can't really remember how I set up the fonts when I did this installation though (font config advice on the wiki I guess).
It is not the repo's maintainers job to keep packages synced up with any "fixed" packages in AUR, that is your own responsibility, and bitching about it won't help you any.
Just pointing out that comments like these aren't really helpful, imho. So you didn't have the problem - that's good to know, but the "fuzz" is about the fact that some of us *DO* have the problem.
It typically doesn't show up on laptops, btw, only standalone LCDs for some reason (has always been the case for me, at least, with both LCDs and laptops, where the laptop never had the problem). So again, the fuss is that a major usability function got broken from an upgrade that shouldn't get broken, and imo it raises some good, if admittedly difficult to resolve, points, philosophical points, etc. about the packaging and upgrade process,

Font.registerFont and ApplicationDomain problem

HI,
Here's the scenario, I have application A that load
application B in a seperate application domain. Application B load
an external font library (font.swf) and when loaded, application B
try to register the fonts with Font.registerFont(fontClass). The
getDefinition() function recognise the class but the
Font.registerFont() throw an error 1508.
If I start application B only the fonts registers properly.
Can anybody help me?

"Woby" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:gfjtds$k2m$[email protected]..
> As usual nobody replyed to my message. This forum suck.
I'm was expecting
> more for an Adobe forum.
>
> To bad
Way to encourage people to help ;-)

Kde vs i3wm font rendering

Hi all,
I am migrating from KDE to i3wm. I see a huge difference in the rendering of the fonts between kde font rendering and i3wm font rendering.
I would like to know how I can get i3wm to render fonts correctly.

litemotiv wrote:
KDE overrides font rendering rules through it's preferences panel (System Settings > Appearance > Fonts), this should be a matter of finding out what tweaks you have made there and apply them to fontconfig manually.
Everything you need to know about font configuration should be available in the wiki. If you have questions about specific details it is fine to ask them here, but something like "how I can get i3wm to render fonts correctly" will only solicit generic responses obviously.
Start here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_Configuration
Tip: many people prefer Infinality for their advanced font tweaking needs.
I noticed that KDE changes ~/.fonts.conf contents based on the changes made in 'system settings'. Since this file (even though deprecated) is used by fontconfig, it should cause the same rendering in other WMs as well.

[NEARLY SOLVED] font rendering in gtk apps problem after last upgrade

Im' using KDE, cairo-lcd, libxft-lcd... my fonts looked beautifully, but now they look horrible...
After last upgrade my gtk apps (firefox, thunderbird) render fonts in an ugly way...
I've tried to revert to pango 1.16.5 with no lucky result (the same problem)...
here is the log:
[2007-08-19 14:56] upgraded bind (9.4.1_P1-2 -> 9.4.1_P1-3)
[2007-08-19 14:56] upgraded glib2 (2.14.0-2 -> 2.14.0-3)
[2007-08-19 14:56] upgraded gnupg2 (2.0.5-1 -> 2.0.6-1)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded gtk2 (2.10.14-2 -> 2.10.14-3)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded kernel26ck (2.6.22.2.ck1-1 -> 2.6.22.3.ck1-1)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded libdownload (1.1-1 -> 1.1-2)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded libevent (1.3b-1 -> 1.3d-1)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded libxtst (1.0.2-1 -> 1.0.3-1)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded nvidia-ck (100.14.11-2 -> 100.14.11-3)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded sip (4.6-1 -> 4.7-1)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded pyqt (3.17.2-1 -> 3.17.3-1)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded xf86-input-joystick (1.2.2-1 -> 1.2.3-1)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded xorg-server-utils (1.0.4-1 -> 1.0.4-2)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded xorg-utils (1.0.2-2 -> 1.0.2-4)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded xorg-xdm (1.1.5-1 -> 1.1.6-1)
[2007-08-19 14:57] upgraded xterm (225-1 -> 229-1)
[2007-08-21 00:16] upgraded cpio (2.8-1 -> 2.9-1)
[2007-08-21 00:16] upgraded ed (0.5-3 -> 0.8-1)
[2007-08-21 00:16] upgraded initscripts (2007.08-1 -> 2007.08-2)
[2007-08-21 00:16] upgraded intltool (0.36.0-1 -> 0.36.1-1)
[2007-08-21 00:16] upgraded libarchive (2.2.5-1 -> 2.2.6-1)
[2007-08-21 00:16] upgraded man-pages (2.60-1 -> 2.64-1)
[2007-08-21 00:16] upgraded pciutils (2.2.4-2 -> 2.2.6-1)
[2007-08-21 00:16] upgraded readline (5.2-2 -> 5.2-3)
[2007-08-22 00:16] upgraded gdbm (1.8.3-3 -> 1.8.3-4)
[2007-08-22 00:17] upgraded kernel26 (2.6.22.3-1 -> 2.6.22.4-2)
[2007-08-22 00:17] upgraded lcms (1.16-1 -> 1.17-1)
[2007-08-22 00:17] upgraded libice (1.0.2-1 -> 1.0.4-1)
[2007-08-22 00:17] upgraded libxrender (0.9.2-1 -> 0.9.3-1)
[2007-08-22 00:17] upgraded procinfo (18-3 -> 19-1)
[2007-08-22 00:17] upgraded xorg-apps (1.0.2-4 -> 1.0.3-1)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded kernel26 (2.6.22.4-2 -> 2.6.22.4-2.1)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded librsvg (2.18.0-1 -> 2.18.1-1)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded libxpm (3.5.6-1 -> 3.5.7-1)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded libxaw (1.0.3-1 -> 1.0.4-1)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded makedev (3.8.3-1 -> 3.23-1)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded mcpp (2.6-1 -> 2.6.4-1)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded naim (0.11.8.2.1-1 -> 0.11.8.3.1-1)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded nfs-utils (1.0.12-2 -> 1.0.12-3)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded pam (0.81-4 -> 0.99.8.1-3.1)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded pango (1.16.5-1 -> 1.18.0-1)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded sox (13.0.0-1 -> 13.0.0-2)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded xorg-apps (1.0.3-1 -> 1.0.3-2)
[2007-08-22 23:49] upgraded xtrans (1.0.3-1 -> 1.0.4-1)
[2007-08-25 15:25] upgraded glibc (2.6.1-1 -> 2.6.1-2)
[2007-08-25 15:25] upgraded bftpd (1.9-1 -> 2.0-1)
[2007-08-25 15:25] upgraded gcc (4.2.1-3 -> 4.2.1-3.1)
[2007-08-25 15:25] upgraded gtk-doc (1.8-2 -> 1.8-3)
[2007-08-25 15:25] upgraded hal-info (0.20070618-1 -> 0.20070725-1)
[2007-08-25 15:25] upgraded perl-xml-simple (2.16-2 -> 2.18-1)
[2007-08-25 15:25] upgraded icon-naming-utils (0.8.2-2 -> 0.8.5-1)
[2007-08-25 15:26] upgraded kernel26 (2.6.22.4-2.1 -> 2.6.22.5-1)
[2007-08-25 15:27] upgraded kernel26ck (2.6.22.3.ck1-1 -> 2.6.22.5.ck1-1)
[2007-08-25 15:27] upgraded libgnomeprint (2.18.0-1 -> 2.18.1-1)
[2007-08-25 22:41] removed libgnomeprintui (2.18.0-1)
[2007-08-25 22:41] removed libgnomeprint (2.18.1-1)
i dunno what happened...
plz, someone help me
regards
Last edited by saneone (2007-08-30 18:11:32)

Bogart wrote:
I think the spacing now is correct, while before it was wrong. The only "problem" is that you got used to a bad font rendering, and now that it has changed for better you feel like it's different and don't like it.
Really, *most* of the problems that people find in Linux's fonts are just because they are used to the awful default fonts from Windows XP. Yes, people can even get used to those fonts and believe they're good!!! And when they see correct fonts in Linux they think they're bad...
What I would do is remove the MS TTF fonts. They work bad in Windows and worse in Linux. You should use Bitstream Vera or DejaVu if you want good quality fonts (especially in web pages).
But, then again, you might think that they look wrong just because you're not used to it... Oh, well...
What does correct font / correct spacing mean ?
IMO, that doesn't make any sense, because that's a totally subjective matter, like many other things in this world.
BTW, I love how fonts look in Windows, and I think that must be the only thing MS got right. Thus, I'm using ms fonts in linux, and a rendering as close as possible (no autohinting or antialiasing or subpixel rendering).
Similarly, I could find a woman beautiful that you would find ugly or just average. We are all different, and it's better that way

Difference in font rendering of JList and other text components

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I have a swing application using JTextField,JTextArea and JList.When I use a font
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Use getFont() on each to the comonents to make sure they are using the same font.

Font rendering in certain GTK+ 3 applications

In some GTK+ 3 applications, fonts appear to have a slightly reddish fuzz and seem a bit unclear; this does not differ by font, so I'm assuming it's a font rendering issue. Is there any known solution to this? I searched around a bit and couldn't find anything.

Pse wrote:Hmm, looks like the wrong LCD filter is getting picked. What desktop environment are you on? I take it it is not Gnome, is it?
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genghizkhan91 wrote:Are you using the infinality packages?
No; just plain fontconfig/freetype2.
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Last edited by rainbowdashc (2014-03-30 14:16:07)

Not-latin font rendering is broken in Kf5 applications

Hello.
After upgrading of KDE4 applications to Kf5 ones, I have the font rendering problem in them.
It's looks like that:
As you can see, rendering of cyrillic fonts is broken. Absolutely wrong font family (should be Terminus) and font size.
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I can see picture without any problems. May be it is regional-specific problem of image hosting.
Google drive link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ZoDS … sp=sharing
Last edited by Lampus (2015-02-03 13:27:56)

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HI and Welcome to Apple Discussions...
Try booting in Safe Mode
What is Safe Mode
Booting in Safe Mode takes a little longer than a normal boot but it deletes font caches and might help.
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Hi,
I am using both KDE and Xfce (mostly Xfce with KDE apps) and I observed that there is a font rendering difference between Gtk (Xfce) and QT (KDE) apps.
In both desktop environments I use dejavu sans font, size 9 and I have set RGB subpixel rendering and hinting to full.
I created some screenshots of dolphin and thunar to illustrate the differences (right click and select view image to see the screenshots in full resolution)
Can somebody help me to make gtk app fonts to look the same as qt ones? Or at least tell me why there is this difference.
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Roboto font not available in certain applications and Openbox menu

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I really like the font and pretty much everything runs well except those two.
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Last edited by COPE (2013-11-04 07:35:17)

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