Font Smoothing on Ubuntu

Font Smoothing on Ubuntu

1. If you want to activate font-smoothing on Ubuntu (Hardy Heron 8.04 was tried) you can try one or both of these: System > Preferences > Appearance > Fonts … Rendering, change to Subpixel Smoothing
2. However that did not affect text in all applications, so try this recipe: http://dancingpenguinsoflight.com/2007/03/ubuntu-and-search-for-better-font/
   1. The main step is to

      sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config

3. Once this runs, select Autohinter, Always, No to the questions. This turns on neat features to emulate Mac OS X font rendering. It will make fonts readable and everyone would be happy. It is highly recommended. When you finish running the reconfigure, be sure to restart X Windows.
   When I made this change, everything else worked fine, except for my System Monitor applet on the Gnome Panel. I had to change its width to 35 pixels to display full height. I found this rather odd, and you may not experience the problem.
4. If you like the Monaco font, which is the standard monospace font on the mac, you can find a .ttf of it online and install it (you'll have to google that one). I got it working in gvim ('set guifont=Monaco' in gvimrc). With the added smoothing after adding the Autohinting above, it looks exactly the same as on the mac.

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