Fonts Problem in Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn - and a Fix

In most cases, fonts in Feisty look just fine. If you don’t have this problem, well, don’t try to fix it.

But on this one setup I tried, they are ugly. Here is are my very brief notes about a successfull fix. Applying the fix is not very easy and might require compiling software and installing packages outside repositories.

Commands below are written from memory and not while working. Thus, there might be typos and other minor mistakes.

Some fonts are blocky. Fonts go on top of eachother, especially when font size is small.

I had to recompile the packages, because amd64 repository was down when I tried. I briefly glimpsed the source before installing. If you feel like it, you can just install the binary packages.

I downloaded source packages from a repository.

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/fonts.list deb http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu feisty fonts deb-src http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu feisty fonts #deb http://raof.dyndns.org/falcon feisty experimental #deb-src http://raof.dyndns.org/falcon feisty experimental

I did not have any keys installed, because I did not want to install unknown binary packages.

$ mkdir compilefonts $ cd compilefonts $ apt-get source libfreetype6, libcairo2 and libxft2

You can also browse amd64 binaries packages I compiled and sources.

Packages have to be compiled and installed in this order: libfreetype6, libcairo2 and libxft2.

For each package, I glimpsed the source. Then

$ sudo apt-get build-deb $PKG

after that, I compiled it. Sources were allready downloaded so net was not needed here.

$ sudo apt-get source --compile $PKG

Then installed. Packages must be installed in order, because -dev packages are used in next compilations.

$ find -iname \*.deb
$ sudo apt-get install libblahblah...deb libblahblah-dev...deb

I did this to each of the three packages.

I restarted X and fonts worked. I did not run fontconfig again after installing the packagees, but I had run it before when trying to fix the problem.

Earlier, I put my fontconfig settings as in gcarrillo 2007: Feisty Font Frustations. My fontconfig settings (done earlier) are ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config’, “Autohinter”, “Always”, “No”; ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig’.

Web pages with previously ugly fonts seemed to render fine now. Fonts in main menus (Applications, Places...) were smoothed.

So the fix worked for me.

mlind 2007: Improved subpixel font rendering for Feisty [For 32bit x86, long direct quote:]

deb http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu feisty fonts
deb-src http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu feisty fonts

[For amd64:]

deb http://raof.dyndns.org/falcon feisty experimental
deb-src http://raof.dyndns.org/falcon feisty experimental

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install libfreetype6 libcairo2 libxft2

sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

[Key for x86 packages]

wget http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu/937215FF.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

[Key for amd64 packages]

wget http://ubuntu.moshen.de/2F306651.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=343670