This is an old revision of the document!


Typeface tuning (Ubuntu)

Fonts are an important part of your GUI. On Ubuntu, you got many possibilities to influence the font-rendering behavior and therefore how text is displayed. But you need to know some things about it, otherwise your resulting typeface may gets unergonomic and bad-looking.

Go to “System→Preferences→Appearance→Fonts” to change the most important settings.

Terms

(Font) Hinting

See Wikipedia: Font hinting.

(Font) Rasterization (or smoothing)

See Wikipedia: Font rasterization.

Install Microsoft fonts

9.04 Jaunty and above

Many websites and documents are using proprietary Microsoft fonts like Arial. Without the needed fonts, some of them are looking really bad. But fortunately, the most important fonts were provided by Microsoft “in the interest of cross-platform compatibility” but under strict rules. The corefonts-project targets an easy installation of them, in a way which “do(es) not distribute Microsoft's fonts in a prohibited way”.

Simply install the following package(s):

To use the new fonts directly on your desktop, go to “System→Preferences→Appearance→Fonts”.

If you are getting errors like “Error while parsing proxy url »http://:8080/«: Invalid hostname.” during installation and your are not behind a proxy server, there is a solution:1)

  1. Open /var/lib/dpkg/info/msttcorefonts.postinst
  2. Search for the following lines:
    db_get msttcorefonts/http_proxy
    http_proxy=$RET
  3. The pound sign # is used to comment something out. Use it to make the installer ignoring the wrong proxy settings:
    # db_get msttcorefonts/http_proxy
    # http_proxy=$RET
  4. Run the following to complete the installation:
    sudo dpkg --configure -a

Install Mac fonts

See also

Print/export
QR Code
QR Code os:ubuntu:tune-typeface (generated for current page)
Languages
Translations of this page: