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dieki
Asked: 2010-08-01 05:07:23 +0800 CST

How can I fix my problems with fonts in Firefox?

  • 772

Ever since I reinstalled Ubuntu a few hours ago, I've experienced major visual artifacts with smaller font sizes in Firefox. The fonts end up looking like this:

http://i.stack.imgur.com/BdpiR.png

Or even like this:

enter image description here

This only occurs in Firefox; other applications are unaffected. It also occurred on the LiveUSB I used for installation, making me suspect a hardware or driver issue. The output of lshw on my computer is here: http://pastebin.com/LnSt6veT.

Any idea what might be causing this, or how I can fix it?

... and "Use Google Chrome" is not a valid answer. ;)

firefox fonts

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The problem was with the Nouveau driver I was using; for whatever reason it wasn't rendering fonts correctly in FireFox. Switching to the proprietary Nvidia driver fixed it.

    • 5

  2. Removing 'msttcorefonts' might also fix it.

    • 3

  3. You seem to have managed to solve your problem. Still, if you're referring to a recent bug in Firefox that makes it 'disobey' the system-wide font settings in Ubuntu, this may help you out: http://www.uluga.ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8193420&postcount=11.

    In short, the bug makes Firefox always render website fonts (and its chrome GUI fonts) anti-aliased (AA). The link above demonstrates how you can edit this and make Firefox always render all fonts crisp and pixel-ish, without any AA (this is especially good for webdesigners and people like me who hate anti-aliased fonts because of their visual artifacts).

    The fix requires that you have root (a.k.a. admin) privileges (many tutorials on how to 'go root' are available online).

    BTW, I'm a total newbie at Linux and Ubuntu is my fist Linux distro, which is why I approach such annoying 'bugs' from an end-user point of view (i.e. quick fixes). Despite this, Ubuntu 10.10 has been a mostly great experience for me and I wholeheartedly recommend it (as well as support all GNU/Linux distros and the open-source and free software movements). :)

    I hope this helps. Cheers.

    • 3

  4. Have you tried tweaking your font hinting settings in Preferences > Appearances?

    Go to the Font tab and click Details... See if a different setting improves the situation.

    • 1