Tag Archives: fonts

Lubuntu change fonts DPI when using proprietary Nvidia driver

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Nvidia LogoRecently during my Lubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal review I've noticed that after installing proprietary Nvidia driver my fonts were a little too small. Since I've discovered the problem was in fonts DPI value, in this article I'll show you how to specify your fonts DPI manually inside your xorg.conf.

Proprietary Nvidia drivers are smart enough to access your monitor EDID to detect it's panel DPI settings. Unfortunately that DPI makes my fonts too small because I like my fonts at standard 96 DPI. Most desktop environments come with GUI tool where you can specify your font size and DPI. LXDE from Lubuntu unfortunately doesn't have this tool so you must specify your fonts DPI manually inside your xorg.conf.

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Change serif, sans-serif and monospace generic font families mapping on Linux operating system

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Ubuntu Font FamilyDifferent Linux distributions map different fonts to generic font families like serif, sans-serif and monospace and thats fine. Unfortunately as a web developer I need those families consistent on all my machines and as similar as possible to generic font families mapping my code users have. Because of that the first thing I do when I decide to keep Linux distribution around is to configure serif, sans-serif and monospace generic font families mapping.

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Font smoothing in Debian 6.0 Squeeze like in Ubuntu

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Debian LogoDebian is great operating system, but lets face it: fonts are ugly on any Linux distribution except Ubuntu. That's OK if you ask me. Why? When I hear word "Debian" my first association is reliable server environment, and I guess you don't need fine tuned font smoothing on white on black terminal. What if you really like having Debian on your desktop, and you also like having normal eyesight? Debian user Hadret who describes him self as "Atheist, Debian GNU/Linux user and a philologist to be" has Ubuntu patched versions of libxft2 and libcairo2 - the libraries that control how fonts are looking, in his Debian repository. All you need to do to fix you Debian font situation is to add his Debian repository to your sources list and do regular apt-get update procedure. Here are the necessary commands to do all of that:

su
echo "deb http://hadret.rootnode.net/debian/ unstable main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
echo "deb-src http://hadret.rootnode.net/debian/ unstable main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
wget -O - http://hadret.rootnode.net/debian/duckbill.key | apt-key add -
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

After you restart you PC you fonts should look much better than before and you should also feel much better about using great Debian operating system.

BASH Script: Google Earth Linux installation with Fix for ugly fonts

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All Linux operating systems with Google Earth 6: I'm very sad to see that this fonts fix doesn't work with Google Earth 6. If you find some other Google Earth ugly fonts workaround please write here so we could once again look at Google Earth with nice smooth fonts. Thanks in advance.

These are the instructions for script attached to this post. It'll download Google Earth from Google servers (if it hasn't been already installed) and tie it to the systems QT files.

Default Google Earth installation flaws

  • Your distributions QT files are generally newer than those provided by Google Earth
  • Google Earth fonts doesn't fit in quite well in standard Gnome and KDE interfaces because Google Earth's QT files are not tweaked to your distribution looks.
  • You have no control over Google Earth's GUI fonts properties. You can't tweak fonts using your distribution's tools like "qtconfig-qt4" because mentioned program have influence only over your distributions QT libraries.

By using this script to install Google Earth you can lead Google Earth to forget its old QT libraries and to use your distributions QT libraries.

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