Fonts too bold at high px sizes

[Jürgen Kreileder]

TT fonts show up too bold at higher pixels sizes. This is especially annoying
on displays with with dpi values. My laptop display has 130 dpi and some fonts
are much too bold at about 10pt. (On 100 dpi displays the same problem can
observed with slighly higher pt sizes.)

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

Can you attach a screenshot demonstrating the problem?

[Jürgen Kreileder (jk)]

Sizes up to 11pt look OK, sizes >= 12pt look too bold.

[Jürgen Kreileder (jk)]

Because of the higher dpi, the problem shows up at smaller pt sizes: up to 9pt looks OK, >= 10pt looks too bold.

[Jürgen Kreileder (jk)]

Sorry, got the title wrong on the 100dpi attachment.

Note that the fonts and windows used in the two examples are about the same size in reality. The second example just looks bigger due to the dpi difference of the two displays.

(Also note, that the GTK theme looks a bit too fragile for the text on the 133 dpi display.)

[Jürgen Kreileder (jk)]

Both system have both the X server and fontconfig (Xft.dpi set via gconf key /desktop/gnome/font_rendering/dpi) running with the the correct dpi value.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Thanks in advance.

[Jürgen Kreileder (jk)]

The situation hasn't changed. Fonts still look too bold at high pixels sizes. E.g. on my laptop (133 dpi display) Arial 10pt looks fine, but Arial 11pt is too bold.

You should be able to see the problem on lower dpi displays too but it will occur with larger pt sizes on those. Just open gnome-font-properties, choose Arial for instance and increase the font size step by step. At some point the displayed font will look too bold.

[Jürgen Kreileder (jk)]

Status Confirmed as I can reproduce this on several machines (some running gutsy) with different dpi displays and different fonts.

[Mike Richards (mrmikerich)]

I have just seen this happen as well running Gutsy. Funny thing is it just happened sometime in the last few days -- I saw it happen after installing a couple new programs and running a dist-upgrade. Not sure what caused it, but now any font over 9px is bold.

[Mike Richards (mrmikerich)]

I have also attached a screenshot. You can see that the bold fonts affects everything in the Firefox window. Not just the text on the page, but the window title bar, the menus, the address bar, and the status bar.

[Jakub 'Livio' Rusinek (liviopl-pl)]

True but isn't it a GNOME issue around DPI?

In GNOME 2.16 fonts looked quite nice, while in 2.22 they're noticeable bigger and ugly.

[Jürgen Kreileder (jk)]

Maybe the default DPI or font settings have been changed in GNOME or Ubuntu but that's an unrelated issue.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

I can't reproduce this issue in Lucid and Maverick, even with bitstream vera sans from Jaunty. Is it still an issue for you ?

[rusivi2 (rusivi2-deactivatedaccount)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!