Running Karmic Koala 32-bit, it’s not the first time I’ve been unhappy with the way Debian and friends do fonts. It’s the one part my Debian experience which has always dissatisfied. So this time I decided to check into the current state of the Freetype2 bytecode interpreter question and anything else which seemed pertinent.
While it turns out Ubuntu has thrown caution to the wind on the bytecode issue, fully implementing it in the Freetype2 libraries, they then hash it up by disabling it by default in the configurations. You can get the full effects in GNOME using the “Font” tab of the Appearance settings, but it won’t apply to everything. Primary examples are Firefox and Opera, which are unaffected by GNOME desktop settings.
This is where you get a dirty deal from Ubuntu. To fix this, you can’t even use the old “dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config” because that does nothing. You don’t get the dialog for choosing your detailed settings. Instead, you have to fiddle directly with linked files in the /etc/fonts directory. There we see one folder which holds the available options — conf.avail — and one for active settings — conf.d.
In the latter folder by default you have 10-hinting-slight.conf, for example. This means by default the entire system will use the lowest quality of bytecode hinting, which can often mean crappy display. The details are covered here on fixing it, which I have modified as follows for LCD use (beware of wrapped lines):
sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf
sudo rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-no-sub-pixel.conf
sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.available/10-hinting-full.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/.
sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.available/10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/.
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
With the apparently large number of people complaining, you would think the developers could figure out to at least default to medium hinting.
