fonts on many pages are not anti-aliased and look very bad, they look like what in opera is called core x fonts, which I always disable to get nice fonts. In firefox there is an option to not allow webpages to choose their own fonts which fixes the bad looking fonts but also affects all other pages which then start using the font specified....

is there an option to turn off core x fonts somewhere or to always anti-alias fonts?


[moved from Software by spinynorman]

Well I've just tried FF3 and almost immediately changed back to V2. As you say FFI the fonts are shocking. All the eyecandy does not improve on the looks either, but that may be me. I didn't stay with it long enough to try and like it. No back I came to a browser I can read the pages comfortably.

I am using FF3 (downloaded directly from mozilla.com) with Mandriva 2008.0/KDE and I have not seen these font problems. Can you provide a link to a web page that exhibits the poor fonts?

I use Ubuntu 8.04 with FF3 which came from the repos and it's OK too.

this one looks bad: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToGetHelp

but oddly enough this one doesn't:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/

many webpages look like the first one though, see the screenshot below

Click to view attachment

Hmmm. Both web pages appear similar to me in terms of font quality. Are you using KDE or Gnome?

I am using KDE and I have enabled anti-aliasing with a hinting style of "slight" from within the KDE Control Center.

I've just downloaded the rpm from the repos which it states is a release candidate and the fonts on all pages render correctly now, much better for these poor eyes. The previous version was downloaded from Mozilla and displayed just what ffi was getting. The two example pages that were given as examples were noticeably different. I have now turned on anti aliasing and the quality has improved even further. One thing I haven't done is install windows fonts. Many sites use these fonts and the substitutes are not quite as good. Could it be that Ubuntu have used windows fonts on one of their pages?

Maybe of some interest?

http://www.dria.org/wordpress/archives/2008/06/10/651/

actually the fonts look bad in ff2 and epiphany too, only opera looks right
using gnome and with subpixel smoothing and full hinting and the plf version of freetype installed...

This is from http://beranger.org/ Maybe it is of some help.

Ubuntu apperantly..... disabling the bitmap fonts (= core x fonts ? ) worked....

thanks