MS fonts look bad, especially in browsers

English Applications
1

I thought fonts looked bad across the board, so I made some changes that I found suggested…

LCD filtering to lcddefault, subpixel rendering to rgb (which is correct for my monitor) and played with the different hintstyle options (light, medium and full). These improved the built in fonts… the Noto font in KDE looked very sharp. But, most of the websites fell back to Liberation Sans in the browser which I felt was too thin and wide for paragraph reading.

I installed the fetchmsttfonts package and then most websites started using Arial, but it looks pretty horrible in both Firefox and Chromium.

I then added the namtrac subpixel repo and the infinality ultimate repo, as I had seen suggested, but it seemed like all of the non-dev packages in these repos were already installed from Main OSS.

I saw one post on reddit saying “the xcb system will actually ignore the subpixel settings”… “Freetype has the support built in, but not turned on for patent reasons”. I’m not sure if this is relevant to my situation, but if it is, I don’t know how to turn it on?

Is there anything else I can try to get fonts not to look horrible in the browsers?

2

If you are using Konqueror, you can set up your own default fonts for websites that do not insist on their own CSS file taking priority. Doing this, I find sites look a lot better in Konqueror than in Chromium. I haven’t checked whether Firefox allows you to set default fonts but, if it does, it would be worth doing it.

3

I mis-tagged this as 13.2… it should have been LEAP 42.1.

Konqueror might look better, but its HTML5 support is very bad so that’s a deal killer for me. I can set a default font but most pages seem to set a font in their CSS. Google search and Gmail specifically I use frequently and they look very bad.

Is it just a given that the MS fonts will look bad?

4

Did you install the MS fonts? They should not be needed any more.