Font configuration

Created: 2015-01-01
Status: notes

Contents

• Setting default font

This is for Linux. (I am using Debian GNU/Linux, but should work on other distros as well.)

The problem originally surfaced¹ when I was trying to get Baskerville working on my Debian machine; on an iPad the Baskerville font rendered beautifully—and this was not just because of its greater pixel density.

On the other hand, on Debian, even when I had the correct Baskerville font installed (read: the identical one), I could not get text to display well. Eventually I found an ArchLinux forum thread about font rendering in Firefox. This led me to a post on the Gentoo forums, which had a very good /etc/fonts/local.conf example file. I simply copied, it—after glancing at it; it seemed good—and now Baskerville essentially renders the same as on an iPad. If you search inside the file for “Baskerville” you will find the relevant lines:

<!-- Make these fonts use autohint slight hinting -->
<!-- Makes only horizontal stems align to pixels.  Truer to glyph -->
<match target="font">
    <test name="family"><string>Baskerville</string></test>
    <edit mode="assign" name="autohint"><bool>true</bool></edit>
    <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle"><const>hintslight</const></edit>
</match>

In fact, Baskerville is not the only font to be helped by this: Computer Modern, which till now had only behaved well under LaTeX, now works rather well as well! Even Linux Libertine (which I like very much; I regard it below only Computer Modern and Baskerville) looks much better; the problem I used to have with uneven open- and end-quotes has disappeared.

—I only wonder, why is this not the default on all Linux machines?

Setting default font

Some notes:

• Setting on Firefox the default serif and sans fonts is a good idea. Now even very plain websites like WikiWikiWeb have Baskerville for me.
• For Japanese, IPAMincho and IPAGothic used to work best for me. For some reason IPAexMincho and IPAexGothic used to produce awful thin lines—but following the font config described above, they are even prettier than IPAMincho and IPAGothic.

Tags: aesthetics, computing, Debian, font, Linux, tinkering.

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