[gentoo-user] Re: Ugly fonts on some seb sites

[Nikos Chantziaras]

Robin Atwood wrote:
> Recently freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net/) updated its look and now I find the
> fonts very hard to read. It seems like they are not being rendered with
> anti-aliasing. Linux Journal (http://www.linuxjournal.com/) seems to have the
> same problem. It makes no difference whether I use Firefox or Konqueror, the
> appearance is the same. How can I find out what font is being used and maybe
> substitute it with CSS?

Hello.

I had the same problem with many sites using "Helvetica", "Times" and 
"Lucida" since they're bitmap fonts and look extremely ugly when the 
size doesn't match (magnifying bitmaps just results in big pixels).

The solution is to substitute them with another font (I use DejaVu, Sans 
or Serif, according to whether the original has serifs or not). Put this 
in /etc/fonts/local.conf:

<!-- Replace Helvetica with DejaVu Sans -->
<match target="pattern" name="family">
         <test name="family" qual="any"><string>Helvetica</string></test>
         <edit name="family" mode="assign">
                 <string>DejaVu Sans</string>
         </edit>
</match>

<!-- Replace Lucida with DejaVu Sans -->
<match target="pattern" name="family">
         <test name="family" qual="any"><string>Lucida</string></test>
         <edit name="family" mode="assign">
                 <string>DejaVu Sans</string>
         </edit>
</match>

<!-- Replace Times with DejaVu Serif -->
<match target="pattern" name="family">
         <test name="family" qual="any"><string>Times</string></test>
         <edit name="family" mode="assign">
                 <string>DejaVu Serif</string>
         </edit>
</match>


Also, it helps to enable the "cleartype" USE flab of cairo (for Firefox, 
Thunderbird, and other Gtk apps; vastly better fonts here with that USE 
flag; it's a nice patch from Arch Linux and fortunately someone added it 
to Portage).