Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Oh My God!! — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 01:31:21 -0000

Font's were the exact reason that I stopped using linux, I used to search online few years back to see if anybody complains about them, I even posted screenshot's of windows and KDE fonts on linux forums asking for a solution(you could imagine how that would have went).

I am glad atlast there are articles on the web about linux font issues (no disrespect, but they look what we get for $0).

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

juuraa — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:26:46 -0000

While I am a big friend of Linux and have been using it for about a decade I was never impressed by the fonts.

Now, in 2008, I am still not very satisfied - I have a big choice of fonts, included MS TTF fonts, and I can chose to use anti-aliasing or not, varying degrees of hinting etc. But nothing works to my satisfaction!

With anti-aliasing enabled under Linux, I get dizzy and I find that the fonts look "too thick". That's why I always (in the end) turn anti-aliasing off again; result: I get less dizziness but also somewhat "scratchy", dirty fonts.

Now if I compare the appearance of a blog or a forum or whatever web site when reading under Linux to doing the same under Windows XP, I must confess (not the slightest doubt about it!):
The XP fonts with anti-aliasing turned on look SOOO much better and cause considerably less strain on my eyes!

In the course of the years I found myself more often than before using Windows more - just because of the so much better fonts! This is with a CRT monitor.

I recently checked out an interesting live CD called goblinx which claims to be a distro dedicated to beauty on the desktop - well, I found the fonts rather blurry and hard on my eyes, while, in fact, on a TFT they really looked nice and didn't cause so much strain on my eyes.

Nevertheless, CRT or TFT, I always find fonts better under Windows, better looking and more healthy to my eyes.

Would love a different result, but sadly this is my honest conclusion.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

micro — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:44:46 -0000

linux font is so dirty , I have linux on my system and it puts me down. I am sick of using the system. It makes me shut down the system as early as possible.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

dragonsblood — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:39:05 -0000

I'm running Linux Mint 4.0 with Microsoft TrueType fonts installed. Looks better than Windows, which I used for many years before migrating. And they were a breeze to install too.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Limulus — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 05:22:18 -0000

How prophetic... a year ago I wrote:

"I wouldn’t be surprised if some large companies with deep pockets and a financial interest in Linux might just donate a font or two ;)"

and nine months after that Red Hat released their Liberation fonts, under the GPL:

https://www.redhat.com/prom...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Bill — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 19:36:05 -0000

Who still needs hinting with today's high resolution displays?
All you need is a proper display, a font engine (font rasterizer) that does antialiasing and a good font.
I like it when fonts are represented on-screen like how they're actually supposed to look. All hinting methods destroy the actual character shapes and screw up the font kerning (more on low quality fonts or with custom hinters of course).

The solution for "better looking" fonts lies in the display technology. We need higher resolution and PPI (DPI) and that's all.

This blog entry is utter junk by the way. :/

- Bill

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

OK — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 13:41:51 -0000

>it’s quite easy to get perfect Mac OS X-like font rendering in Ubuntu/Kubuntu.

Only if you know nothing about kerning and hinting. And only if you never saw ClearType on a DVI monitor, and Vista's or .NET 3.0 ClearType in particular.

Linux will never catch up, unless someone pours *millions* of real $$$ in OSS font and typography.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Arun — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 01:30:53 -0000

I don't know if you know this, but it's quite easy to get perfect Mac OS X-like font rendering in Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Just so you know.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Damien — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 16:56:42 -0000

What is wrong with the default Ubuntu font set (DejaVu)? I actually had installed the MS core fonts but removed them because I thought they looked worse than DejaVu. For example, some letters (like the 'k') used really thin lines with the MS fonts.

Actually, Mr. Scoble, if you haven't tried Linux in a while, you may be surprised now... Most distributions used to not enable the bytecode interpreter in FreeType by default (which allows hinting of glyphs), so all the fonts were ugly. I agree with you that this would definitely be an instant turn off for anyone trying Linux for the first time, and actually, that is what turned me away from Fedora originally and a big reason why I went with Ubuntu instead, where it was enabled by default. I think Fedora has it enabled also now.

Also, Tim Bray was specifically talking about Emacs which uses different (uglier/aliased) fonts and has pretty much nothing to do with Linux in general. You can't judge an entire OS based on one app.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

mystilleef — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 13:29:40 -0000

What the hell are you talking about? Fonts on Linux look fantastic. Better than the junk I see on Windows and OS X.

If someone can tell me how to reproduce this caliber of fonts on Windows or OS X, I'll buy him a beer.

http://scribes.sourceforge....

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Brian Boyko — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 11:04:30 -0000

Jeff, I'd like to see a few side-by-side picture comparisons of Windows, Mac, Linux Gnome, and Linux KDE fonts. Could you point out specifically what's unreadable/readable about each in a followup?

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Jonathan Schemoul — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 03:37:59 -0000

Hello,

If you try to use gnome, just change the fonts antialiasing setup and the fonts you use (in two clics that is)...

I use gnome on my computers and have even better fonts and readability than in Windows or OSX... Linux is about choice. You can choose to have great fonts :)

Cheers,
Jonathan

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Brian — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 22:39:13 -0000

I find that Mac beats Linux beats Windows in this area. I think fonts on Windows look terrible, and I've used the ClearType tweaking utility before. After using Linux, ClearType just looks blurry with random colors standing out around the edges.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

llimllib — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 17:24:20 -0000

Fonts are one of the reasons I *like* Linux.

I used to agree with you, around Red Hat 7 & 8, but now both Fedora and Ubuntu's fonts look much nicer on my laptop than on Windows.

Actually, I'm on my work Windows machine right now. I tried switching my default font over to Tahoma, but it looked atrocious (blue lines between ll).

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Chris Tyler — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 14:55:54 -0000

I've posted a comparison screenshot of a page being rendered in XP and SUSE 10.1 here (Firefox, default font rendering settings):

http://blog.chris.tylers.in...

Each to his own, but I think that the SUSE rending looks better, hands-down.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Jim — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 01:38:25 -0000

Linux faltering due to fonts ONLY is a stretch, but a VERY large part of our perception of the world around us is visual, so I would have to agree that it plays a large part. Installing fonts is pretty painless in most linux distros so I don't know what the fuss is.

Linux has bigger problems than fonts though.....

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

anna — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 06:33:24 -0000

linux have nice font ? where ? :D

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Jordan — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 13:27:27 -0000

This may be an outdated post, but i've been able to install all the fonts I was able to install on Windows into Ubuntu, so as far as i'm concerned nowadays Linux can handle those type of fonts.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 16:12:19 -0000

Maybe another reason Linux isn't taking off is that they don't have any highly paid marketing guys working for them.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Flux Amm — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 12:40:28 -0000

Remark #35 is my situation and I spend most of my time in the Ubuntu partition of my oldest computer: "...if someone had three computers set up (one Mac, one Windows, one Linux) they would find themselves gravitating towards the one with the nicer fonts."
Configurations and hardware can be so different that nobody can simply dismiss another's complaints as wrong. In fact, I did a complete reinstall of Ubuntu because something borked my font rendering!
"Best shape" rendering works best for me, and URW Bookman as default (overriding page-specified) is awesome in Firefox.
I've read that Ubuntu Edgy is more attentive to looks. Certainly, a single app/interface that gives one access to every tweak in font rendering would be a BIG help.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Andrei — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 14:35:56 -0000

If you think fonts are part of the problem, then you mght find my recent blog post of interest.

http://www.designbyfire.com...

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Quiescere — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 18:43:49 -0000

And there have been excellent free fonts around for as long as I can remember. Christ, I see GoodDog Cool on billboards these days.

Even now, with the amount of work required for Unicode fonts, there are still projects like DejaVu, Linux Libertine (http://linuxlibertine.sourc..., and Gentium (http://scripts.sil.org/cms/.... Gentium in particular is just lovely, and I use it as my default in most cases.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Juhapekka Tolvanen — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 18:14:38 -0000

4) BTW those fonts of Windows Vista are still vaporware or at least beta just like the Vista itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

And at least Consolas is such a crap in its beta version that it will probably be such crap also in final Windows Vista:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Those idiots at M$ made that font so that it looks good only when ClearType is enabled. What a crap!

5) We already have many open-sourced but high-quality fonts also for exotic languages:

http://www.unifont.org/font...

6) What you say about Matthew Carter is not wrong but quite misleading: The most important parts of his font family called Bitstream Charter has been freely available many years in X Window System, because Bitstream donated them. Those fonts are also as Type 1 font, so they look good with antialiasing and. Some people took them and extended their glyph collection. That new font family based on Charter is called Charis SIL:

http://scripts.sil.org/Char...

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Juhapekka Tolvanen — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 17:13:10 -0000

That blog-entry is plain crap. 1) Linux has anti-aliasing and hinting capabilities, already. It has had them for many years. 2) We already have Bitstream Vera -fonts and they are default font in many Linux-ditributions. 3) Some people took those Bitstream Vera -fonts and started to extend them. That project is called DejaVu: http://dejavu.sf.net/ . They are now becoming the default in many Linux-distributions.

Re: Linux’ achilles heel: fonts

Robert Scoble — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 14:00:46 -0000

Marco: I don't set a font. Your browser does that. Change the default font in your browser and you'll find that my page's font changes along with it.