Making your fonts fontastic!

One thing Linux often gets bashed about is 'the fonts look crap', or something similar.

True, it's hard to deny, most distros ship their distro without enabling certain features to give you great looking fonts. (Basically to avoid patent issues).

Having said that, there is no issue with users deciding what's best for them.

I recently read a blog post describing how to get those nice crisp clean fonts that we all would like. That in turn lead to this excellent post, that has a great ~/.fonts.conf file if you like the look of those silky smooth Apple OSX fonts. (In fact some people think these settings make Linux fonts appear even better than OSX! -- ymmv)

Take a look at his example screenshots, comparing Windows (no AntiAliasing), MacOSX, and Linux -- and you decide.

I turned it on Thursday night, and it's been refreshingly crisp and clean. Well worth a look.

I'd be interested to know what other options people are setting and what they've discovered to get the 'wow' factor out of their fonts.

Some great background reading can be found on the font-config website, and in particular the fonts-conf User Manual.