Comments on: What a small thing. what a great improvement (configure your font settings)

By: KDS

KDS — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 04:15:00 +0000

Steve Jobs talks about fonts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA

He says that fonts are a very important part of a computer, he is so right! Now only if Mac OS X fonts were open source or free…

By: supportFSF

supportFSF — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:35:50 +0000

Fantastic! using the liberation sans variant, it looks 100% better than default font. Somehow this is more appealing to my eyes. For sure this is much better than the default which i had! Thanks for sharing this

By: Ralesk

Ralesk — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:52:26 +0000

Slight hinting is awesome — I use it without subpixel antialiasing though (so, simple greyscale AA). And I can recommend trying Droid Sans for the UI

Consolas (yeah, yeah, a Windows font) is an excellent terminal font, too.

By: Nost

Nost — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:29:23 +0000

Liberation Sans is even better.

By: afiestas

afiestas — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:22:19 +0000

Mailinator FTW :p

By: yero

yero — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:08:49 +0000

Well, while anti-aliasing obviously made things much better, the subpixel rendering goes a bit too far (or not far enough) on my display. The strokes are lined by a reddish edge on the one side and a blueish one on the other.

Have to play around a bit, but just wanted to say, that it might be display-dependend, which settings work best (that’s why there are that many…).

By: Irina

Irina — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:59:04 +0000

Thanks! These are actually my default settings too but I hadn’t thought of it after reinstalling.

By: Joey

Joey — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 06:06:09 +0000

I use Calibri Bold 9, RGB sub pixel rendering with Slight hinting. I’m really fond of it.

By: Renze

Renze — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:03:36 +0000

Oh, and I should also mention that sub-pixel rendering only looks good on LCD displays (or similar)… it looks dreadful on CRT displays (does anyone still use these?).

By: nidi

nidi — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:32:50 +0000

good writing about the problems with anti-aliasing and all of this: (warning, contains strong language)

http://modeemi.fi/~tuomov/b/2006/the_case_against_blurred_fonts/

By: m_goku

m_goku — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:58:31 +0000

I use Liberation Sans instead, with full hinting. I think it’s look better

By: Renze

Renze — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:09:29 +0000

I too use Droid Sans rather than DejaVu Sans, and I must say that slight hinting looks worse than full hinting with Droid Sans, not to mention most website fonts look worse in my browser window too. Very font specific.

By: Karthik

Karthik — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:09:07 +0000

Eye opener!

By: nidi

nidi — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:49:40 +0000

Not wanting to start a flamewar, but there are also other sensitive options, for me:

I’m always disabling anti-aliasing and use bitmap fonts only and my setup is perfectly crisp for me (e.g. “menu fonts look light windows xp, not like vista” if this is useful for someone). Non-aliased fonts are a bit ugly with big fonts though. It’s non-convenient when using vector fonts a lot, e.g. in wysiwyg-Editors like KWord.

The display resolutions are currently (still) too bad for vector fonts, at least for me, as I don’t want to use anti-aliasing which makes everything smooth and wastes energy (bold statement).

By: pheder

pheder — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:20:12 +0000

I recommend using Droid Sans 8 for the toolbar – it’s narrow, which is important in the toolbar and it’s very easy to read at this small size. Plus, as it’s a different font than elsewhere it feels like it belongs to the icon and can’t be confused with other stuff (just easy for the eye).

By: afiestas

afiestas — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:19:17 +0000

@blueget Maybe this is why KDE is not shipping with "Slight" by default

By: blueget

blueget — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:05:59 +0000

Interesting – “Slight” Hinting looks ugly on my machine, while “Full” works great.

By: Michael Kreitzer

Michael Kreitzer — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:05:11 +0000

Another great font set are the Droid fonts. They are part of the Android repository. They’re especially good at small point sizes.

By: anselmolsm

anselmolsm — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:46:09 +0000

DejaVu Sans FTW!

I’ll test these anti aliasing settings, let’s see. thanks =)

By: illissius

illissius — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:40:41 +0000

This is one of the first settings I always configure. Apparently I’m not everyone?