lucumr

Alright. I’m back in Austria and once again my arrival in my home made me feel somewhat patriotic :-) Although we had much fun on the trip it’s a great feeling to come home again. The next weeks will be quite busy because of various changes in my life (the most obvious one is that I’m not a pupil any more)

I was sure that i will be able to use most of my spare time for my projects and myself but as it turned out two days ago the newly gained freedom has some major disadvantages too. There’s quite a lot of legal stuff I have to cope with and new opportunities I have to consider and probably take. In one of my last posts I wrote about myself being offline for two weeks — that’s just partially true. I’m back in Austria but I will be offline because biking from tomorrow.

Other news: I will buy a guitar in the next two weeks, and because my harddisk once again broke in that darn notebook I want to buy a mac book as soon as Leopard is out. Expensive summer.

In my old blog I had one article about font settings in ubuntu edgy. Unfortunately I don’t have an online backup of that page and there was a request for the data there, so I just post it here again as blog post:

There are many ways to improve the font rendering. (That’s because the ubuntu defaults are hideous). Since hoary I use my own font configs based on a configuration from someone I can’t remember.

If you’re looking for a screenshot have a look at the screenshots in the vim article.

xorg.conf
Locate Section “Monitor” and add the following line before !EndSection:

DisplaySize     XXX YYY

You can calculate XXX and YYY using this formula:

DisplaySize = height / 96 * 25.4 width / 96 * 25.4

Here the values I use for various systems:
1024×768 = 270 203
1280×1024 = 338 270
1400×1050 = 370 277

selecting rendering method

dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

Run a root and select “subpixel rendering”.

local.conf
Create a file /etc/fonts/local.conf and paste the following lines:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
 <include ignore_missing="yes">/var/lib/defoma/fontconfig.d/fonts.conf</include>
 <match target="font">
  <test compare="more" name="pixelsize" qual="any">
   <double>12</double>
  </test>
  <edit name="autohint" mode="assign" >
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
  <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
  <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
   <const>hintmedium</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="pattern">
  <test qual="any" name="family">
   <string>Bitstream Vera Sans</string>
  </test>
  <edit name="family" mode="assign">
   <string>Arial</string>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="pattern">
  <test qual="any" name="family">
   <string>Helvetica</string>
  </test>
  <edit name="family" mode="assign">
   <string>Arial</string>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="pattern">
  <test qual="any" name="family">
   <string>Palatino</string>
  </test>
  <edit name="family" mode="assign">
   <string>Georgia</string>
  </edit>
 </match>
</fontconfig>

even better settings
You still don’t have what you want? Then try out the patches from this thread on ubuntuforums. But use my local.conf which produces better bold fonts.