Enable Smooth Fonts in Debian.

[hugortega]

Actually, I have that firefox flag activated, also the KDE smoothing font option, but with this config I can select some fonts that didn't look very well before, even GTK-based applications looks better than two days ago (and also, I have the gnome smooth-font flags activated) ...

This option is a nice global improvement.

Hugo

[John A]

Here's the .font.conf file I use. It's not that much different than the one originally posted, but it has a few differences: it replaces the Helvetica font with 'sans-serif', because it's not a true type font, which looks bad. Also, it turns off autohinting on bold fonts as those tend to get too wide (particularly on web pages).

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<!-- Disable sub-pixel rendering.
 X detects it anyway, and if you set this as well, it just looks really horrible  -->
<match target="font" >
	<edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
	 <const>none</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>hintfull</const>
	</edit>
 </match>

<!-- The first part of the 'magic.'
 This makes the fonts start to look nice,
 but some of the shapes will be distorted, so hinting is needed still -->
 <match target="font" >
	<edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
	 <bool>true</bool>
	</edit>
 </match>

<!-- Autohinter is not turned on automatically.
 Only disable this if you have recompiled Freetype with the bytecode interpreter,
 which is run automatically.<br />  -->
 <match target="pattern" >
	<edit mode="assign" name="autohint">
	 <bool>true</bool>
	</edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
		 <test name="weight" compare="more">
				 <const>medium</const>
		 </test>
		 <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
				 <bool>false</bool>
		 </edit>
 </match>
<!-- Helvetica is a non true type font, and will look bad.
 This replaces it with whatever is the default sans-serif font -->
 <match target="pattern" name="family" >
	<test name="family" qual="any" >
	 <string>Helvetica</string>
	</test>
	<edit mode="assign" name="family" >
	 <string>sans-serif</string>
	</edit>
 </match>
 <dir>~/.fonts</dir>
</fontconfig>

This is based off the .font.conf file provided here:
Problem with Linux and LCD monitor?? - LinuxQuestions.org