Nearing Zenith

Lucid Lynx Font “Fuzziness”

Something’s up with the font rendering in Lucid Lynx. Judging from some of the official and unofficial screenshots, I’d say I’m not the only one experiencing what I’d like to call “fuzziness” with the default on-screen font rendering. Fortunately, there’s a quick way to revert back to the old font rendering behavior, if that’s more to your liking.

The Issue

Compare the following two images, “fuzzy” and “crisp”:

versus

The first image is the default “Sans 10pt” font rendering for Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS). It’s using LCD sub-pixel smoothing and font shape hinting. Overall the font is big, but fuzzy, like perhaps there are fingerprints on the screen. The top window is Evolution, which really doesn’t look too bad, but the bottom window is the terminal (where I spend a bit of time) and it’s just atrocious. I’m not too keen on this rendering.

The second image is what I’ve seen for the past few years from X-based window managers (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc.) and on other operating systems as well. Font shapes are crisp and there’s very little dullness to the edges. Overall, the font appears to be a bit smaller, but (for me) much easier on the eyes. Look at that beautiful console font… Yowza!

The Fix

It all comes down to the font hinting style. The default is “Slight” and the old-style setting was either “Medium” or “Full.” “Medium” looked better to me, so that’s what I’m using.

Here’s the dialog to change the behavior, tucked under System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Fonts -> Details…

I’ve marked the settings I like in green, but you get the idea. Explore, have fun, and don’t settle for fonts or rendering styles that don’t suit you!