Flaky rendering of "Luxi sans" font

[Joachim Frieben]

Choosing "Luxi sans" as the default desktop font in "Font Preferences" results in very unpleasantly looking characters. The line width seems to be uneven. Setting the "Hinting" option to "none" on one hand make things slighty better, but on the other things the characters become quite fuzzy. Please have a look at the attached screenshot. On some other Linux distro, "Luxi" fonts are the default, and with the same settings, everything looks great.

[Joachim Frieben (jfrieben)]

"Luxi sans" font sample screenshot ("Hinting" equals "slight"). Note the very uneven rendering especially for large, bold characters.

[Daniel Eckl (daniel-eckl)]

Did you try "sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig" and setting the hinter to autohinting?

[Joachim Frieben (jfrieben)]

Great, after application of the command mentioned above, Luxi font rendering is as good as I am used to having it for my default Linux distro. In my opinion, even the Ubuntu default fonts look better now.
Something like Daniel Eckl 's suggestion should have been added to a post install script or even become the system default. The attached screenshot shows the huge difference compared to my previous sample.

[Joachim Frieben (jfrieben)]

"Luxi sans" font sample screenshot (hinter set to "autohinter"). Smooth and nicely rendered characters.

[Joachim Frieben (jfrieben)]

Hi Matt, setting the severity to "minor" is quite subjective as decision. For me, the poor font rendering in Ubuntu has been the main reason to refrain from adopting it as my default distribution. It is normal that the visual appearance has a huge impact on the impression that a new user gets - more than technical subtleties that my not even have any influence on the usability of the system. I hope the issue will be dealt with anyway.
----------------------------------------------------
** Changed in: fontconfig (Ubuntu)
     Severity: Normal => Minor
--
Flaky rendering of "Luxi sans" font
https://launchpad.net/malone/bugs/32831
----------------------------------------------------

[Daniel Eckl (daniel-eckl)]

Just to bump the issue:
I'm on Edgy now and the needed command changed slightly to:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
And the solution to this problem IMHO would be a GUI option to activate this.
And just my opinion in the discussion of "what should be default": I always read messges of users, finding of the native hinter as ugly and the autohinter as beautiful. Never heared of the other way round. But I might be wrong here...

[Craig73 (funrun73)]

Thank you 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.

On my machine (Dell Inspiron 700m) I'm not noticing much of a difference playing with this setting. That being said, the current version of Ubuntu allows some font rendering adjustments under System - Preferences - Appearances. I find I get a better look by turning on sub-pixel rendering [which sets slight hinting] (which is not the default, I believe the default is Gray Scale - Medium Hinting) but I'm don't remember the reason why this is not on by default (for LCDs)

We were wondering if this is still an issue for you. Can you try with the latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Daniel Eckl (daniel-eckl)]

With Feisty and above I didn't need such tweaking anymore. Fonts were corrects from beginning after clean install.
For me this issue is gone, but I'm not the reporter.

[Craig73 (funrun73)]

Considering this fixed unless I hear otherwise. If it is still and issue, please update with current details. Thanks.