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My font rendering in Firefox looks terrible on pages such as facebook.com and twitter.com:

enter image description here

I'm running Debian 8 and fiddling with hardware acceleration, and it doesn't seem to work.

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5
  • I think Firefox uses the default font for these things. You can edit the default font from Firefox preferences. Is this what you asked for? – nitishch Sep 1 '15 at 17:11
  • It still didn't change things. The fonts look great when I don't allow sites to choose their own but this messes up some icons. Any other suggestions? – user241948 Sep 1 '15 at 17:21
  • This is just with Firefox and not a system problem? – nitishch Sep 1 '15 at 17:24
  • Right. Everything looks great on chromium – user241948 Sep 1 '15 at 17:25
  • Probably you have the bitmap version of Helvetica installed – contemplator Sep 2 '15 at 17:33
37

I've had this issue for ages, maybe it's time to do something about it!

It comes done to ClearType, Microsoft and patents from what I read. Most *nix distro's disable any patent protected font rendering by default.

Read about Debian and fonts here, you want Subpixel-hinting and Font-smoothing section.

There's a config file on that page but I will add here for future reference. Create a file called .fonts.conf in your home directory, and add the following:

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="rgba">
   <const>rgb</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="hinting">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
   <const>hintslight</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
  <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter">
    <const>lcddefault</const>
  </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>
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9
  • 3
    If I could, I would have upvoted this 50 times. Thanks for such an elegant solution (still usable in 2016 using Debian Jessie and GNOME)!!! – maulinglawns Dec 23 '16 at 16:48
  • 1
    Still working by 2017, Debian Jessie and KDE. Thanks! – kR105 Apr 27 '17 at 20:19
  • 2
    Still working in 2017 on Stretch too! – natebc Jun 5 '17 at 13:27
  • 1
    I can confirm this in 2019. Thank you! – Dexter Jul 1 '19 at 19:55
  • A more "modern" location for the file would be ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/fontconfig/fonts.conf or ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/fontconfig/conf.d/99-improved-rendering.conf. Most of the time ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME} is the .config subdirectory under the home directory, e.g. /home/gwillie/.config. – Cristian Ciupitu Nov 8 '19 at 20:51
9

These sites use Helvetica as their font. On most Debian systems it's not an outline font, but raster one. You can disable bitmapped fonts as the last stage of font configuration dialog:

$ dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
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  • 2
    I just ran this without changing any of the answers, and it improved fonts instantly! (maybe dist upgrade caused some problems) – Jürgen Strobel Jul 5 '17 at 4:23
1

I've improved mine these days using fontconfig-infinality. Looks great!

The first topic of this forum shows how to do it. Do not use the first method of the link(compilation), use the deb files below it. Install with 

dpkg -i *.deb

and then

bash /etc/fonts/infinality/infctl.sh setstyle

choose option 2 (infinality)

DONE!

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0

I have tried the suggestions above with Firefox 75 and KDE 5.6 (Arch based Antergos linux) with no success or only slight improvement. Only after changing the Firefox font settings to Fira Sans and the fonts in Firefox gui (tabs, menus, etc) finally started to look sharp, almost as good as in Chromium based browsers. I could not replicate this with any other font no matter how I've set hinting and aliasing.

Menu -> Preferences -> Language and Appearance section, and there I changed teh Default font to Fira Sans. You can play a bit more with the Advance section. You can try Fira Mono as monotype font etc.

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This won't help many people, but ...

For me it was some ancient Adobe.pfb files in my .fonts directory. Specifically Helvetica.pfb .

If you have Adobe Postscript files from the 90's laying about, have a look with:

fc-match -s Helvetica | grep -i Helvetica

and see if anything lurks. I 100% would have expected @Perlence 's answer to fix this, but apparently .PFB is an exception. I don't see this problem in Chromium-based browsers, so maybe Firefox is handling it?

Anyway, the good news is as soon as I removed it, I was able to switch back to my test tab (archive.org) and as soon as Firefox reloaded the DOM it was perfect. In previous iterations I quit Firefox, logged out of my X11 session, rebuilt the font cache, etc. but none of that was ultimately needed.

See here for a before and after for identification/comparison:

archive.org before and after removing PostScript bitmap

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