MEPIS Community Forum

Yes, the difference is very noticeable in Chrome/Chromium. Hopefully those patches will enter Debian Stable and Mepis.

I may not be in the mainstream here but I can see some differences in the screenshots. In addition I have to say is that all the renderings appear somewhat 'fuzzy' to my eyes. Now whether that's a limitation in the electronic transmission and reception process I don't know, but there it is, a kind of corona or halo effect. A somewhat indistinct outline to almost everything onscreen. That may be me being hypercritical though. :)

I've noticed the debian fonts in the past also. I would hope that by now this sort of thing was in the past. It really shouldn't be that hard nowadays to use a decent rendering engine. I think/hope that things have settled over the last few years. TT was supposed to be a big step up for instance.

Not just these old eyes then.. I was very glad to see the TT fonts become a reality myself and find them a very worthwhile improvement.

Having come from the days of Linux on a tape and/or loads of floppy disks and not a GUI in sight I am happy at last (2011!) to have a desktop beginning to rival those 'other systems' but there's room for improvement yet. I have to admit being impressed by a friends netbook running a tweaked XP recently. Soo slithery and a bit of a feast for the eyes. Can't say that bout Netscape derivatives et al just yet. :-))
{tin hat now on}

ashtonford"]the xubuntu is much sharper and clearer

you should try pinguy 11.10 thats what Iam currently using as a daily os it has all the extras already included in the package. It would be perfect for a person new to linux as well as a person looking for a complete daily distro that everything works out of the box with no tweaking etc. http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=pinguy



Yes, on my computer Xubuntu 11.10 looks much better than Mepis 11, fonts are full and clean and smooth. Debian Stable and KDE fonts look weak, shadowy, and spidery.
I've tried various settings and fonts but there is just something wrong in the font configuration files or something else in those systems.









m, as


mentioned, regular Debian Stable looks worse than Mepis, but I don't have those on my computer.

Mepis 11:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/J ... directlink

Xubuntu 11.10:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/U ... directlink

Note that I have an AAO with a ten inch screen that I'm rather close to. I imagine on anything over 20 inches that you are setting some distance away from font rendering is probably not as noticeable.
KBD[/quote][/quote][/quote]

I must be going blind/er. I really don't see a difference between Mepis and Xubuntu on those examples. At least I have an appointment next month with the eye Dr.

It doesn't sound as if anyone has done any research into the why of the differences that are perceived.

They have lucky, quite a few times, but it falls on deaf ears.
Posted yesterday by mike_pav

Fonts in GTK applications like Firefox and Libreoffice need some further actions. Here is what I did.
1.) Enable antialiasing, set DPI 96, subpixel hinting slight.
2.)create a new file called .Xdefaults in your home directory, containing the following text:

Xft.autohint: 0
Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault
Xft.hintstyle: hintslight
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.antialias: 1
Xft.dpi: 96
Xft.rgba: rgb

You can play with the third line by changing it to Xft.hintstyle: hintfull. However, try both to see which looks better on your machine.

3.) Then create another new file in your home directory called .fonts.conf, with the following text:

<fontconfig>
<match target="font">
<edit mode="assign" name="rgba">
<const>rgb</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font">
<edit mode="assign" name="hinting">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font">
<edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
<const>hintslight</const>
</edit>
</match>
<match target="font">
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

Make sure the line hintslight matches the third line of your .Xdefaults file (see above). Logout of your desktop and login again for the changes to take effect.
For convenience I have attached both files in a zip folder. Good Luck.

I always check and change as necessary. The default theme for my KDE 4.6.5 was totally unusable. I had trouble navigating to where I could change it. It was simply a total disaster. Inexcusable comes to mind.

I'll try your tweak shortly neerajmot. How much does it help in your estimation?

Yes, somehow the default theme that 4.6.5 comes with from Debian is Air for Netbooks. However, I believe anyone that respins an ISO can have it set to some more sane theme.