Recently, well actually a few months ago, I filed a bug regarding the
default font configuration on Fedora installs. The default font
configuration just looks wrong and leads to browser font rendering in both
Firefox and Chrome that looks radically different from what it normally
looks like on Windows and Mac OS. Ubuntu manages to do this correctly and I
actually had to copy their font configuration to get things to look right.
This is a really annoying manual configuration step I really shouldn't
have to do with something as polished as Fedora.
This issue is critical because the web-browser is where we spend 90% of our
time and is the most important graphical application on any modern system
and the font-config should be properly set to optimize that experience.
Steps to fix this problem:
1. Install 'freetype-freeworld' from RPMFusion for LCD filtering.
2. Copy Ubuntu's font configs to '/etc/fonts/conf.d'
3. Enable RGB sub-pixel in the desktop environment font configuration.
Please take a look at the bug for more details.
[1]
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1036220
So this leads to a few questions about how this is setup:
A) What is the scope of desktop environment based font-configuration?
Basically if I enable and configure this from the GNOME or KDE system
settings shouldn't it apply to all applications even the browser? If the
desktop environment fails to set the proper font anti-aliasing in the
browser is this a bug specific to that environment? Are there applications
that for technical reasons are separate from the desktop environment such
as Google Chrome that uses it's own font rendering engine?
B) Since the patents have expired shouldn't freetype-freeworld be included
by default?
C) Shouldn't system-wide font-config be controllable from a simple
'system-config-fonts' program?
Ideally a solution to this is to create a small application that runs in
the terminal that allows the user to set the system-wide font-config. This
way users don't have to manually edit the '/etc/fonts/conf.d' files. In
the short-term this should provide some relief.
Thanks.