Fonts after upgrade

[rolandpish]

I want to thank Monsta for the work as well. I confirm that it is working for my LMDE+Xfce!! (I had to restart for the changes to take effect)

The only difference is that I specified the absolute path when creating the symbolic links, for example:

Code: Select all

ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-antialias.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-antialias.conf

(I remember having issues in the past when using relative paths (../ and similar) in symbolic links)

Thanks again!

[BucolicBuffalo]

Thank You! Thank You! Ran it in a root terminal and rebooted. Looking great now.

Thinking out loud about what I've just read when I followed GeneC's links...

1. Reconfiguring fontconfig-config just changes a few symlinks in /etc/fonts/conf.d to point to the appropriate (depending on what has been chosen during the reconfiguration) files in /etc/fonts/conf.avail.
2. Ubuntu's fontconfig-config package has additional symlinks which are missing in Debian's one. For example, 11-lcdfilter-default.conf. Look at the file list and see for yourself.
3. I suspect that setting things in ~/.fonts.conf works only if there is the respective symlink in /etc/fonts/conf.d. For example, the lcdfilter option won't do anything unless you have /etc/fonts/conf.d/11-lcdfilter-default.conf pointing to ../conf.avail/11-lcd-filter-lcddefault.conf. This is just my speculation, please correct me if I'm wrong.

So here's what I've done. I didn't reconfigure fontconfig-config, didn't install Ubuntu's version of it, didn't even create and edit ~/.fonts.conf.
Just made a little script that makes all the missing symlinks (I hope I didn't miss any of them myself) and ran it as root.

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh

WHOAMI=`whoami`
if [ x$WHOAMI != xroot ]; then
    echo Please run me as root.
    exit 1
fi

cd /etc/fonts/conf.d

ln -s ../conf.avail/10-antialias.conf 10-antialias.conf
ln -s ../conf.avail/10-hinting.conf 10-hinting.conf
ln -s ../conf.avail/10-hinting-slight.conf 10-hinting-slight.conf
ln -s ../conf.avail/11-lcdfilter-default.conf 11-lcdfilter-default.conf
ln -s ../conf.avail/53-monospace-lcd-filter.conf 53-monospace-lcd-filter.conf

Font quality got better. Immediately.

Though I have some doubts about some of the fonts (not all of them) in Firefox. And I don't use Chrome.
Moreover, my eyes are quite tired from today's tinkering with all this font stuff, so I may have missed something. Just test this script please and see if it works for you.

[clod81]

font on firefox are alright for me
chrome looking really bad, no idea how to fix it

[Monsta]

Out of curiosity, I've installed Chrome in my virtual LMDE machine and saw the fonts aren't that bad. Maybe a little worse than in Firefox. What's looking equally bad in both browsers is some bold fonts, e.g. the top menu bar on google's main page.

You can try what GeneC said, i.e. editing ~/.fonts.conf (and maybe even ~/.Xdefaults - I really don't know what settings Chrome may look at ).
It didn't do any good for me though, the fonts are looking the same as they were after I've applied my script.

[killer de bug]

Monsta,

I really thing you have found a very nice solution. I created the links and the fonts are looking far better now.

Thanks a lot, I will make a backup of these lines right now !


edit : typos

[sackofspuds]

Just made a little script that makes all the missing symlinks (I hope I didn't miss any of them myself) and ran it as root.

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh

WHOAMI=`whoami`
if [ x$WHOAMI != xroot ]; then
    echo Please run me as root.
    exit 1
fi

cd /etc/fonts/conf.d

ln -s ../conf.avail/10-antialias.conf 10-antialias.conf
ln -s ../conf.avail/10-hinting.conf 10-hinting.conf
ln -s ../conf.avail/10-hinting-slight.conf 10-hinting-slight.conf
ln -s ../conf.avail/11-lcdfilter-default.conf 11-lcdfilter-default.conf
ln -s ../conf.avail/53-monospace-lcd-filter.conf 53-monospace-lcd-filter.conf

Font quality got better. Immediately.

Though I have some doubts about some of the fonts (not all of them) in Firefox. And I don't use Chrome.
Moreover, my eyes are quite tired from today's tinkering with all this font stuff, so I may have missed something. Just test this script please and see if it works for you.

Thanks a million, Monsta. Worked very well.

By way of background I updated to update 5 today and made the mistake of installing some new versions, against the advice of the release notes:

Always choose "keep file" (as opposed to "install new version")

Anyhow, perhaps as a result, the fonts were horrible in Chromium. Monsta's script appears to have restored them.

Out of interest, my Terminal application also displayed black on black, ie, invisible. I've opened a new post on that - viewtopic.php?f=198&t=113073

[Dave W.]

Sorry if these are really stupid obvious questions, but how do I use Monsta's script? Do I just put it in the terminal as root?

Also, what if I saved the font settings on a thumb drive and then swapped them out with the updated fonts. Could/would that work?

Thanks,
Dave

[killer de bug]

The simplest is to execute all the line starting by ln -S one by one as this in a terminal :

sudo ln -S ....


OR : you can copy the text in a file, and save it let say on the desktop as "file.sh". Then you need to make this file executable :
in a terminal type sudo chmod a+x /desktop/file.sh

Then cd /desktop
And $ sudo file.sh

I think it should work

[Dave W.]

Thank you killer de bug. It most certainly looks much better.

Thank you too Monsta for the fix.

Dave

[clod81]

after symlinking and reboot, chrome is looking good again.

[Monsta]

Well I guess you can now mark this thread as [SOLVED]