Ubuntu

Gutsy: small and non-anti-aliased fonts

Bug #131811 reported by Florian Effenberger on 2007-08-11

This bug report is a duplicate of: Bug #118745: Font sizes in Gutsy are affected by bad X.org DPI detection. Edit Remove

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Ubuntu	Invalid	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

Gutsy has completely screwed up the fonts for my machine (ThinkPad T42p). They are much too small and don't look good, not antialiased etc. Feisty had great font rendering.

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Amir Eldor (amireldor) wrote on 2007-08-11:

Hello and thanks for the bug report!

Which gusty version did you download and install?
Can't you resize the fonts under System->Preferences->Fonts?
On my gusty installation, the default fonts looked just fine.

You'll have to give us more information on how we can reproduce this bug or we won't be able to debug and fix it.

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Florian Effenberger (floeff) wrote on 2007-08-11:

Thanks for the fast reply!

I can resize them, but it seems that either the "good" fonts are missing, or the font rendering has completely changed. Fonts don't look so smooth anymore with Gutsy (I tested Tribe3 and Tribe4), and they are much too small, in the LiveCD as well as in the installed system.

To compare, I just re-installed Feisty, and they look smooth there.

Attached are two screenshots. One with Feisty, one with Gutsy.

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Florian Effenberger (floeff) wrote on 2007-08-11:

Screenshot of Feisty Edit (736.3 KiB, image/jpeg)

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Florian Effenberger (floeff) wrote on 2007-08-11:

Screenshot of Gutsy with "broken" fonts (taken from LiveCD, but installed system looks the same) Edit (540.7 KiB, image/jpeg)

Seems the dpi value is set too low per default

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Florian Effenberger (floeff) wrote on 2007-08-11:

Screenshot of Gutsy after fixing DPI value Edit (696.2 KiB, image/jpeg)

But still something is missing... it doesn't look the same

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Florian Effenberger (floeff) wrote on 2007-08-11:

I just did an in-place upgrade from Feisty to Gutsy, and it seems to be *much* better
Had to correct the DPI settings as well, but the fonts look much better
However, not as smooth and clean as with a Feisty install, unfortunately

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Florian Effenberger (floeff) wrote on 2007-08-18:

Could it be related to the changed font rendering in Gutsy? Can I send in any debug logs that help?

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Nicklas Larsson (kilsmo) wrote on 2007-08-25:

I have some extra information that may help.

Test this in Firefox:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

<html>

<head>

<title>Testing small font</title>

<body>

Hello
</body>

</html>

Then, test it in Opera.

Change it to px and test it again.

Fonts in Opera is much bigger than Firefox in both cases.

On other platforms than Gutsy tribe 5, the font sizes in Firefox and Opera are equal.

If I change layout.css.dpi in Firefox to something other than -1 (which is the same as 96), I do not get the right sizes whatever size I set. It seems like there is some other value somewhere in the system that is also compensating for DPI.

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Nicklas Larsson (kilsmo) wrote on 2007-08-25:

Just tried the setting the dpi with the system also, and that worked well.

I found that my dpi was set by default to the unconventional value of 74.

The dpi issue is something that I have seen a lot in Linux distributions historically, and it has been one of the things that annoys me so much that I turn down the distribution if it fails.

There is a simple solution: hardcode the dpi to 96. A lot less people will get annoyed with a hardcoded dpi value that actually works, than the few that want to have a dpi value exactly matching the screen.

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Florian Effenberger (floeff) wrote on 2007-08-26:

#10

With manually setting the dpi value, fonts get much better. But they are still not as smooth and great as with Feisty. Feisty had brilliant fonts out of the box, and Gutsy looks really ugly, even after tweaking. ;-(

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote on 2007-10-13:

#11

[Expired for Ubuntu because there has been no activity for 60 days.]