fonts

# Title Anti-anti-aliasing fonts # Date 2007-02-16

Reading long texts on the screen is one kind of activity, interacting with an application is a different one.

When I read texts, I prefer antialised serif fonts . Since texts should not contain more than about 70 characters per line, the size of the font can be rather big, when using a high-resolution (1280x1024 @ 96 dpi) monitor.

When I interact with an application a want a crispy, sans-serif font readable at a small size, leaving screen estate to other content.

Nothing strange with these preferences I'd say, accordning to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typeface#Serifs that seems to be the conventional viewpoint.

Why is it then that anti-aliased fonts nowadays are the default of both text rendering and text in the user interfaces of applications (and desktop environments like GNOME and KDE)? Anti-aliasing in most cases make a sans-serif font less readable, so it's plain stupid to use it for menues, gadgets, or short informational words or phrases.

Here's how to configure the gtk-based user interfaces to use a very clear readable font:

####### Contents of .gtkrc ##########

style "user-font"
{
  fontset="-microsoft-verdana-medium-r-*-*-*-90-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1"
}

widget_class "*" style "user-font"

####### End of .gtkrc ##########

####### Contents of .gtkrc-2.0 ##########

style "defaultfont"
{
	font_name = "Verdana 10"
}

widget_class "*" style "defaultfont"

gtk-font-name ="Verdana 10"
gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs"

####### End of .gtkrc-2.0 ##########

For fontconfig not to anti-aliase you also need the following in ~/.fonts.conf

<?xml version="1.0"?><match target="font" >
 <test name="family" >
  <string>Verdana</string>
 </test>
 <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
  <bool>false</bool>
 </edit>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
   <const>hintmedium</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
</match>

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Last modified: oktober 17, 2019