Make your fonts very very nice in gecko-based browsers

[makzu]

I was digging around all over on the net trying to get information on font antialiasing, and this is pretty much what I found on the Mozilla-based browsers (including Galeon, Epiphany, Mozilla Suite, Firefox, and Thunderbird). Turning these options on makes everything niiiiiiiice and smooth. Some people might not like the way everything looks afterwards, but I like it a lot, so.

Most of these programs are easy to activate font smoothing on. For all the borwsers (everything on that list except for Thunderbird), simply type about:config (notice there's no space in there!) into the location bar. That'll bring up an interface that's used to edit various preferences that there's no other way to mess with. There's a lot of stuff in there, but we're only concerned with 3 things, really:
font.FreeType2.autohinted
font.FreeType2.enabled
font.FreeType2.unhinted

You can double-click on these options to change the values. To make a long story short, you want to set autohinted to true, enabled to true, and unhinted to false. Then, all you'll need to do is restart your browser, and your fonts will be silky smooth. You can experiment with the settings in about:config all you want to - some settings might be more pleasing to your eye than others.

For Thunderbird, things get a little tricky. There is no location bar to type about:config into, so there's no easy way to get into the configuration. So, we have to create a file called user.js.

So, in a terminal, simply type in

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nano -w ~/.thunderbird/default/(random characters)/user.js

Then paste the following text into the file:

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user_pref("font.FreeType2.autohinted", true);
user_pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
user_pref("font.FreeType2.unhinted", false);
user_pref("font.FreeType2.enable", true);
user_pref("font.freetype2.shared-library", "libfreetype.so.6");
user_pref("font.antialias.min",        0);
user_pref("font.embedded_bitmaps.max", 1000000);
user_pref("font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.min", 0);
user_pref("font.scale.tt_bitmap.dark_text.gain", "0.0");
user_pref("font.directory.truetype.1", "/usr/share/fonts/ttf-bitstream-vera");
user_pref("font.directory.truetype.2", "/usr/share/fonts/TTF");
user_pref("font.directory.truetype.3", "/usr/share/fonts/corefonts");
user_pref("font.directory.truetype.4", "/usr/share/fonts/freetype");
user_pref("font.FreeType2.printing", true);

This turns on the font antialiasing, and also tweaks a few other settings. Technically, you could get away with those first three lines, but the others can't possibly hurt.

Save the file and (re)start Thunderbird. You should notice a very noticable difference in your fonts.

In addition to all of this, you can get things to look even better if you set your browser to use the ttf-bitstream-vera font family. Each browser (and Thunderbird too) should have its own font settings page, and they're all very similar. Just make sure you use Bitstream Vera Serif for Serif, Bitstream Vera Sans for Sans, and Bitstream Vera Sans Mono for Monospace. Set your minimum font size to 9 and make sure "always use my fonts/colors" are unchecked.

Bam, nice smooth fonts for your browsing and emailing convenience.

[finr]

Thanx, firefox sure looks a lot nicer now

[Drunken Master]

Why not enable auto hinting directly in fontconfig?

[kamagurka]

hm.
my firefox doesn't have the mentioned entries in about:config.

but i'm updating now, i'll get back at you when i'm done.

[makzu]

kamagurka: I compiled firefox without the moznoxft USE flag. If you used that flag, that might be the cause of the options not showing up.

[kamagurka]

kamagurka: I compiled firefox without the moznoxft USE flag. If you used that flag, that might be the cause of the options not showing up.

umm, i never even heard of that flag.

[makzu]

Ah. Well, in that case, you could probably just put the files in your user.js file for firefox. The file doesn't exist by default, but that's easy to fix:

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nano -w ~/.mozilla/firefox/default.xxx/user.js

should do it. The '.xxx' are actually three random characters. I'd just use tab completion to find it. Once you get there, you can either paste in the three lines that I have bolded, or you can use the block I have there for thunderbird. Either one will work.

[kamagurka]

hmm.
no effect...

[PaV]

no effect here too

[neenee]

ditto.

[grzewho]

IMO the only way to enable hinted fonts in mozillas is to build it with xft support, in other cases the options mentioned above won`t work

or am i wrong ... ?

[chunderbunny]

There is one other option that needs enabling for this to work in Firefox:

Edit > Preferences > General >Fonts & Colors

Now make sure the "Always use my: fonts" is ticked. The setting should apply without needing to restart.

[max4ever]

To make a long story short, you want to set autohinted and enabled to true, and unhinted to false

what about font.FreeType2.enabled ?

[sog]

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There is one other option that needs enabling for this to work in Firefox:

Edit > Preferences > General >Fonts & Colors

Now make sure the "Always use my: fonts" is ticked. The setting should apply without needing to restart.

just an FYI, this completely skewed the look and feel of a bunch of sites for me as it forced my font settings on every page, overriding that provided by the site.

if that's what you're looking for, cool, but i turned it off.

[makzu]

what about font.FreeType2.enabled ?

That's the main one. You want to set that to true, and that'll turn the smoothing on.

As for the "always use my fonts/colors" checkbox, using it will make pretty much every site use the serif font. If you don't mind serifs, then that's fine, but having the box unchecked won't cause any problems.

[makzu]

And for more font smoothing madness, check out the X.org and fonts howto on Gentoo's Wiki. It's got a lot of information on how to smooth out your fonts in every other application, not just gecko browsers. I followed the instructions, and now everything looks very nice.