[SOLVED] Firefox messes up ligatures when displaying Calibri font

Question

Hi,
This problem has been bothering me for a while and I can't figure out what's wrong.
To ilustrate this, here are a few quotes from Coding Horror, one affected site:
It's difficult to fix without making major changes to the web's infrastructure.
For example, I just noticed that Twitter, transparently to me and presumably all other Twitter users [...]
[...] such as swiping left or right with four fingers to switch between apps.
In bold are the charecters that stand out (and I mean it) when reding the text. I dare not post a screenshot, for I believe this may kill your soul as it has been slowly killing mine.
So far, Calibri is the only font that I found that shows this behaviour, and it's not in all programs. Some affected programs are Firefox and Thunderbird. In LibreOffice, for example, it shows normaly.
I do not remember having done any font configuration in my system, but I'm not sure where I should check...
Thanks for your help!
Last edited by vitoreiji (2012-03-04 06:29:21)

Answer 1

There are nice patches for freetype2 that can make fonts look much better (even those tricky ones, like Calibri). In order to do so, you may want to replace some of your packages:
* freetype2 with freetype2-infinality,
* fontconfig with fontconfig-infinality,
* libxft with libxft-cleartype,
* cairo with cairo-ubuntu.
They should significantly improve the rendering of your fonts. Of course, you can always check other versions of the packages in the AUR: I assume that the above combination should be safe in most cases, and the final result satisfactory for the user.
Edit 1: It's worth reading the Wiki article on font configuration to get the idea what and how can be tweaked.
Edit 2: And here comes a screenshot:
Last edited by bohoomil (2012-03-01 19:56:27)