Fuzzy Font Rendering

[Pascal de Bruijn]

In certain applications, fonts in some area's are rendered in a fuzzy fashion.

So far, only MonoDevelop and OpenOffice.org seem to suffer from it.

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

In the tabs you can see the fuzzy fonts

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

In the right 'Solution' bar you can observe the fuzzy fonts.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Likely to be a fontconfig issue. What font do you use for them, what font rendering settings for fontconfig and the desktop font capplet?

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

Application font: Sans (10)
Document font: Sans (10)
Desktop font: Sans (10)
Window title font: Sans Bold (10)
Fixed width font: Monospace (10)

Font Redering:
Subpixel smoothing (LCDs)

[ooops (ooops)]

I can confirm this 'bug'. I had a closer look and the incriminating font seems to be 'DejaVu Sans, ExtraLight' (e.g. use memstat |grep fonts). On a laptop I get in a default configuration (clean dapper, new account, fontconfig default answers - native, automatic, no bitmap fonts) a very light and fuzzy rendering (font rendering set to best shape). In case I switch on subpixel-rendering I get even blurrier and colorfull fonts. I can provide screenshots etc. in case it is necessary. Best way to confirm this is: 'gnome-font-viewer fonts:///DejaVu%20Sans%2C%20Ultra-Light'. I have no idea if this is a fontconfig bug or a quality issue with the font-hinting. Other DejaVu fonts do not have this issue.

Actually monodevelop is using the following fonts. I think the vera-ones are probably not intentional too.

    132k: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSans-ExtraLight.ttf 11244
    144k: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSansMono-Bold.ttf 11244
    152k: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSansMono.ttf 11214 11244
    196k: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSerif.ttf 8363 11244
     68k: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-bitstream-vera/Vera.ttf 11244
     60k: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-bitstream-vera/VeraBd.ttf 11244

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

Maybe simply removing the ExtraLight version from ttf-dejavu would resolve the issue?

If I'm not mistaken the ExtraLight version is still considered experimental bij de DejaVu folks themselves.

[Adam Niedling (krychek)]

The original reported doesn't mention Ubuntu version. Is this problem solved already?

[ooops (ooops)]

On Sun, 2008-08-10 at 15:52 +0000, Adam Niedling wrote:
> The original reported doesn't mention Ubuntu version. Is this problem
> solved already?
>
> ** Changed in: fontconfig (Ubuntu)
> Status: New => Invalid
>

Here it looks like that Monodevelop does not use the 'DejaVu Sans,
ExtraLight' anymore. So for what it counts it is solved for monodevelop.
It does not use the bad font by default anymore.

It is still valid that 'DejaVu Sans, ExtraLight' is rendered plain ugly.
Just do a 'gnome-font-viewer fonts:///DejaVu%20Sans%2C%20Ultra-Light' on
your favorite LCD-screen.

BR, Peter

[Jiri Bajer (sarimak)]

I can confirm that:

$ gnome-font-viewer fonts:///DejaVu%20Sans%2C%20Ultra-Light
$ uname -a
Linux sarim-eee 2.6.24-21-eeepc #1 SMP Thu Aug 7 22:18:05 MDT 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 8.04.1 \n \l
$ dpkg -l | grep deja
ii ttf-dejavu 2.23-1 Metapackage to pull in ttf-dejavu-core and t
ii ttf-dejavu-core 2.23-1 Vera font family derivate with additional ch
ii ttf-dejavu-extra 2.23-1 Vera font family derivate with additional ch

+ see the screenshot

[Victor Vargas (kamus)]

Since this report have a long time without activity please could you check under latest release included in Ubuntu Lucid if this issue is still affecting you? Thanks!

[ooops (ooops)]

The font rendering is still crap. As said above monodevelop does not use it anymore.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

That's a problem with antialiasing which also sometimes use some green, blue or red for small or thin fonts. However I'm unable to reproduce the rendering issue with Garamond which is of good quality whatever the size is.

[Pascal de Bruijn (pmjdebruijn)]

I think we're mixing several problems here...

OpenOffice.org and MonoDevelop used to use a badly hinted version of DejaVuSans-Light, which was the root cause of the problem...

Now the light fonts are nolonger in the base dejavu-sans package, so you don't have it installed by default anymore...

So I think this bug can actually be closed...