Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
I installed Linux Mint recently, and while I'm getting it set up fairly well, one item that I still haven't got quite to my liking is the fonts. I like my fonts to be crisp and non-blurry.
In general, Mint was okay, but when I started up my IDE I found that the default monospace font, Monospaced, was pretty bad, especially when bolded, and that certain sizes of the other default fonts (Sans) were not great, either. After exploring the options a bit, I downloaded the Core fonts for the Web, changed some default fonts in various programs as well as Mint itself, and now have it set up decently with Georgia, Arial, and Courier New as my go-to fonts. I also turned off anti-aliasing to avoid the blurriness that was driving me crazy, and turned hinting up from Slight to Full, which significantly decreased the blockiness that was introduced when I turned anti-aliasing down, without re-introducing the blurriness.
Which is relatively good, but even with the hinting, there's some noticeable blockiness in some fonts, most notably Arial, which is my default for sites such as NBR and Wikipedia. If I go over to my Windows XP laptop and turn off font smoothing (which is usually set to Smooth, as opposed to ClearType, which I find a touch too blurry in XP), Arial looks very similar to what it does on Mint.
So, I think what I'm looking for is a way to have some anti-aliasing, but not so much as what the Grayscale and RGB anti-aliasing options give me in Mint's Fonts option (they are way too blurry for me). Is there a way to do this? With the settings I've changed so far, it's acceptable, and the Georgia is rather elegant, but it's still not as good on the whole as what I have on XP.
Other font suggestions are welcome, too. I don't really care about whether they're open source, just whether they look smashingly crisp and sophisticated on the desktop.
Fonts, and how to fine-tune them
Discussion in 'Linux Compatibility and Software' started by Apollo13, Jul 31, 2014.
