
Why do the fonts in Firefox Linux look so terrible?Dave, Why is it that, "out of the box", the Firefox browser looks great (font wise) when run on a Windows OS but looks terrible (almost too small and unreadable) on any Linux OS I have tried it on. It is probably the number one killer reason for me not switching to Linux. At a standard screen resolution of 72 dots per inch, any small typeface is going to look pretty mediocre, and I know what you mean about Linux defaulting to a really high resolution for a given screen, which produces tiny type. However, it turns out that it's pretty easy to change your desktop to have larger typefaces, or even to tweak Firefox to look better. The easiest way to have larger type across your entire Linux experience is to simply pick a smaller screen resolution. If you're at 1280x1024, for example, change it to 1024x768 and watch how everything gets a bit bigger and easier to read. Depending on your desktop and window manager, you might also be able to pick a different theme that has larger fonts too. Within Firefox itself, you can change Firefox font settings from the Edit -> Preferences menu item (pick General, and click on "Fonts & Colors"). Pick a larger font, reload the page, and see how it looks. Of ocurse, you can also just use the key combination Ctrl-+ (the Control key and the + symbol at the same time) to make all the type on a Web page larger. I use that extensively when I browse the Web too, actually. Hopefully those tips will help you out and let you give Linux another shot. I did ask a couple of Linux wizards, Dee-Ann LeBlanc and Ray Lischner, about this problem and they reported excellent results with Firefox on Suse Linux, Fedora and RHEL.
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Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader. I personally cheat...err....I mean, I install the Microsoft core web fonts (Verdana/Georgia) on Linux, and set the default proportional font to Verdana (even serif). The Times/Serif version that comes with Fedora isn't very easy on my eyes, and I prefer sans-serif font for the screen anyway. Everything you need for installing Microsoft fonts on a Linux box is here: http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/ Posted by: Stewart Vardaman at January 27, 2005 12:30 AMIf you choose "other" for the font size, you get a dialog with a horizontal line. Meaure the line and enter the length in decimal notation, so if (for example) the line is 1 9/16 inches, you would enter 1.5625 and select inches, then click OK. Your choices are inches or centimeter. To the right of display resolution in the Fonts and Colors dialog there is an option to set the minimum font size. Posted by: Ernie N. Wilcox, Jr. at January 27, 2005 1:21 PMDave had some good information, but I believe he missed the point of the question. I had the same problem with all Mozilla and Netscape browsers. The problem is not in the User changeable fonts but those in the hard-coded areas of the menus and the URL addr box. I solved the problem by using Gnome instead of KDE. KDE does not seem to properly display Mozilla windows. I'm not an expert, but KDE does pretty well with all other windows, but there seems to be a problem or at least a font shrinkage with Mozilla browsers. KDE is a little too much like Windows for my taste, so the change to Gnome was a good solution for me towards a plainer and more easily read display anyway. Good tip, Richard. I lean towards GNOME over KDE anyway. :-) Posted by: Dave Taylor at January 27, 2005 4:18 PMThe problem is that the form fonts are too small by default. There are several places you can adjust these. Donn Posted by: Donn Shumway at January 31, 2005 4:54 PMGreat stuff, Donn, and yes, changing your entire GUI because one app looks crummy is a bit daft, but the original question referred to "all apps being too small", hence my suggestion. Posted by: Dave Taylor at January 31, 2005 6:41 PMAnother good global font solution is to set your actual 'Usable' screen size in your XF86Config or xorg.conf file. Measure your usable screen size in millimeters (Width then Height). Now In the Monitor Section, under the specific Monitor you are using (you can have more than one), add a line that says: Donn Posted by: Donn Shumway at January 31, 2005 8:02 PMFollowing Richard Kircher's line of thought, the answer to this question can be found at: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=22232 Posted by: Christefano at October 26, 2005 2:41 PMDave I also think you may have missed the point. I set my resolution to the exact same specs on linux as on windows, so that can't be the issue. Out of the box, linux turns people off. The fonts on LCD monitors especially are extremely blurry/crooked, with the exact same resolution settings as on Windows. Programs that use GTK are bad. QT is better but still not clear like Windows. Until these basic issues in linux are fixed, not many people will take it seriously as a desktop operating system. The other issue I noticed immediately when using firefox on Linux is that the downloads suck up all the bandwidth. On Windows i can download a huge file and browse the internet at the same time. On linux the download sucks up all the bandwidth and I cannot browse the internet at even turtle pace. I know these issues can be fixed by going into certain config files and maybe even recompiling the kernel (laughing out loud) but the fact is that out of the box linux is not good for a desktop right now. It's okay, but it isn't good. It's definitely not great. Don't get me wrong - I use linux and bsd every day myself on my local servers and public web servers. But I'd like to see these issues for the desktop cleaned up with linux. It doesn't matter whether we can go into config files and fix these issues - what matters is what works out of the box - because people are lazy, even ambitious programmers who know what they are doing like to have a working, clean, and clear system out of the box. Posted by: L505 at December 13, 2006 12:40 PMChristefano is right. By simply enabling the mapping between gtk and qt things can really get cleaned up. ~quickshiftin` Posted by: quickshiftin at February 5, 2007 7:53 PMReduce the screen resolution! That's just daft, man... Posted by: harri at September 10, 2007 3:32 PMI have a lot to say, but ...
I do have a comment, now that you mention it!
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