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Accepted
Anwar
Asked: 2019-04-07 08:22:30 +0800 CST

Font hinting is lost in Chrome-like browsers (for some languages )

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Since Ubuntu 18.04 (maybe from 17.10, I can't remember), some languages' font hinting are lost in Chrome-like browsers (like Chromium, Bangla, ... ). Also, Chrome's UI font itself renders so bad that the use of Chromium on Ubuntu became impossible. Interestingly, all Ubuntu derivatives inherited this bug but other distros like Manjaro don't show this behaviour.

Below is a screenshot demonstrating the problem: the text of "Autofill" and "Appearance" becomes fuzzy (Click on both of the images for a full-size image)

Hairy :-) fonts

Below a screenshot of the expected behaviour:

Sleek fonts

What's an easy fix to this issue?

fonts 18.04 19.04

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The fix:

    sudo nano /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-ja.conf

    change on line 8 family to lang

    <test qual="all" name="lang" compare="contains">

    TL;DR:

    I began the test with replacing all Ubuntu *.conf files in the /etc/fonts/conf.d directory with Manjaro's to test whether it was a config bug (I thought it was in the freetype library). New configs worked well. Further investigating revealed that the specific issue is in the /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-ja.conf file. This file had at line 8

    <test qual="all" name="family" compare="contains">

    which seems to be wrong, since the family was already selected. It should be lang instead. Editing line 8 fixes all the annoyance.

    <test qual="all" name="lang" compare="contains">

    Hope, it will help some people like me. I filed a bug report in launchpad here. I encourage people to test the bug and click on "This bug affects me" link if this answer helped you.

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