[SOLVED] Firefox and bad fonts

Question

I would like to start using Firefox and its excellent plugins, but the only thing that prevents me are the fonts. They seem plain evil!
They are fuzzy and somehow too large and CTRL++ or CTRL+- won't help with the look. Take a loot at these:
Firefox: fonts are fuzzy and some characters are looking like painted - see the copyright sign for example! :evil: Also the distance between different characters in a word doesnt seem to be equal all the times and that makes it hard to grasp the word.
Mozilla Suite: crisp and clear
I think it is somehow xft - related, because I downloaded the standard Mozilla suite build and it also had these awful fonts and then tried the non-xft build and fonts were ok. In Appearance-Fonts they are described as Serif -> adobe-times-iso8859-1, Sans-serif -> adobe-helvetica-iso8859-1 and so on. How could I get these fonts appear in Firefox, too?
I have tried to compile Firefox myself with disable-xft option, but it fails with an error about gtk not being found in pkgconfig path.

Answer 1

What you call "crisp", I just call "aliased". The fonts in Opera are also aliased, which makes them look poor. Your Firefox's fonts look nice, except the fact that the autohinter is making them look sloppy. Comment that part out and see how it looks.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<!-- /etc/fonts/local.conf file for local customizations -->
<fontconfig>
<!--Use the Auto-Hinter-->
<!--<match target="pattern">
<edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>-->
<!--
Disable anti-aliasing for fonts that are size <=12
<match target="pattern">
<test qual="any" name="size" compare="less_eq">
<int>12</int>
</test>
<edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit>
</match>
-->
<!--
Enable sub-pixel rendering
<match target="font">
<test qual="all" name="rgba">
<const>unknown</const>
</test>
<edit name="rgba" mode="assign"><const>rgb</const></edit>
</match>
-->
</fontconfig>
Cheers.