Font Rendering - No More Jealousy

I suppose this kind of content is what most people use twitter for these days. But since I’ve remained strong and stayed well away from that, I suppose I will have to be a tad retro and write a short blog post about it. If you like me are an avid Fedora user, I’m sure you’ve thrown glances at colleague’s or friend’s Ubuntu machines and thought that there was something that was slightly different about the way it looked (aside from the obvious Gnome vs Unity differences). Shinier somehow…; So had I, but I mainly dismissed it as a case of “the grass is always greener…”.

It turns out that the grass actually IS greener.

Tonight I stumbled upon this. It’s a patched version of freetype. For what I assume are political reasons (free as in speech), Fedora ships a Freetype version without subpixel rendering. These patches fixes that and other things.

With a default configuration file of 407 lines, it’s quite extensible and configurable as well. Lucky, I quite like the default!

If you’re not entirely happy with the way your fonts look on Fedora - it’s well worth a look

Feb 28th, 2012