Difference between revisions of "Mint Linux Font anti-aliasing"
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Latest revision as of 21:13, 5 October 2024
This one is not for everybody. Desktop fonts, text fonts in the web browser, and in many areas of the mint desktop environment are made to look soft and smooth, this is purely an aesthetics quality that offers no functionality. It looks pretty. It also gives some people a headache trying to read text on a web page or on the desktop that is fuzzy. If you disable what is called HINTING and ANTIALIASING then, with a good LCD monitor, your fonts will be sharp and crisp, but will also take you back in time to the 1990's in that they will appear jagged. So, therefore, this modification is a personal preference. I will trade the clean refinement of soft text in an effort to relieve my headache and eye strain.
To enable old fashioned jagged nasty looking (but sharp and easy on eye strain) fonts I have found this 1 - 2 punch combination to work.
1. drop to terminal shell and execute the following commands:
sudo mv /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-antialias.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/.disable.10-antialias.conf sudo mv /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-antialias.conf /etc/fonts/conf.avail/.disable.10-antialias.conf
2. In Mint Cinnamon desktop goto MENU -> Preferences -> Fonts and in the "Font Settings" area change HINTING to "slight" and Antialiasing to "None"
In the case of Firefox I did not notice a difference right away. It seems like the system had to flush some visual cache but once that happened I got those good old fashioned jagged sharp text back. This impacts desktop icons, menu text, browser text, but some things are not impacted such as Konsole (the KDE terminal uses different font properties) and similar software.
The changes are easy to undo. Simply reverse the process above.
THERE ARE PROBABLY BETTER WAYS TO IMPROVE FONTS to find a happy middle ground between modern anti-aliasing and not having fuzzy headache inducing text. Some examples are making use of resources such as installing "Typecatcher Fonts"
sudo apt-get install typecatcher
Another option people recommend is installing something called "Droid and Noto fonts"
sudo apt-get install fonts-droid fonts-noto
And finally, going back to MENU -> Preferences -> Fonts you can configure the environment to use one of the new fonts you just installed.
