[hardy] fonts have had different proportions since update

Can somebody change the name of this bug please?
evil typo, s/properties/proportions/
thanks

i have to say I like the change, if it is an error, maybe something along the lines of a bolder but less "messier" font should be in store for hardy.

I can confirm the today's change in rendering. I don't like the change at all, it looks horrible at any possible configuration available. The resolution is 1680x1050 (on a 15,4'' Thinkpad and 22'' Samsung LCD). I would be pleased to get back the old way of rendering/antialiasing. But I'm dreading the thought that this "bug" might be just another step in "improvement" as experienced first when upgrading Feisty to Gutsy. In Gutsy at least greyscaling/strong hinting was acceptable. Please don't make Ubuntu so damned Vistaish.
Since my change from Suse to Ubuntu 5.04 I was pleased to find a state-of-the-art font rendering. It's been sharper thus better readable and less tiring than in Suse and it looked way smoother than in WinXP. To cut it it short: for me it's been just PERFECT.

I saw the same problem. It's caused by the language-selector 0.3.0 update. After downgrading all is back to normal.

This is because of a change in fontconfig, which sets hinting to medium and anti-aliasing to greyscale. This is the default setting on the gnome desktop in Ubuntu anyways (at least in Hardy).

Same problem here. I hope this is not the place to discuss if this change is nice or not.

In gnome I have turned on subpixel rendering and set hinting to strong. The fonts were perfect before the update (since gutsy they look as nice as rendered with cleartype in Windows XP) and I hope that this bug will be fixed soon.

I can confirm the workaround suggested by Juergen. I've dowgraded language-selector and language-selector-common to 0.2.9_all.deb and since then fonts look nice again. Thus, maybe this is not duplicate of bug 199523.

This isn't a duplicate. The problem is caused by 29-language-selector-ja-jp.conf which enables the autohinter. This gives ugly results with some fonts (which have good hints), for example with the Microsoft fonts (Arial, Verdana, ...).

It's possible to work around this with $(HOME)/.fonts.conf but I don't think the autohinter should be enabled globally.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
    <bool>false</bool>
  </edit>
</fontconfig>

Obviously there's a closing </match> missing in my previous comment. (I have more stuff in ~/.fonts.conf).

Moving back to appropriate package.

Can confirm bug and Juergen Kreileder's workaround.

Same here, can confirm bug and Juergen Kreileder's workaround. Btw if this is a new, hardy's way of font rendering, it is just unacceptable for my eyes.

I have the same problem in kubuntu hardy alpha 6.

1 enter "sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config" and select None and None, after enter "sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig" and reboot xorg
2 enable and disable rgb aliasing
3 type "sudo apt-get install ttf-liberation"
4 set hinting full

seems maintainers have not noticed this bug yet; assigning to Arne Goetje who did a change accord to changelog

I did notice this bug, I just didn't have time to look at it yet.

thank you for the fix

I confirm the bug on font rendering. I partially fix it by DisplaySize option in xorg.conf but the rendering in gutsty is very better ...

This bug was fixed in the package language-selector - 0.3.1

---------------
language-selector (0.3.1) hardy; urgency=low

  [ Michale Vogt ]
  * LanguageSelector/gtk/GtkLanguageSelector.py
    - use absolute path when calling gksu (LP: #194166)
  * data/language-selector.desktop.in:
    - remove X-KDE-SubstituteUID
  * fix icon inconsistency (LP: #164316)
  * LanguageSelector/qt/QtLanguageSelector.py:
    - fix charackter encoding in UI (LP: #186157)
  * data/Language-selector.glade:
    - make the main wndow type "Normal" (LP: #148912)

  [ Arne Goetje ]
  * debian/rules: remove dh_link for locale specific fontconfig files
  * LanguageSelector/FontConfig.py: link all locale specific fontconfig files
    only when the locale is called. (LP: #199557)

 -- Michael Vogt <email address hidden> Wed, 12 Mar 2008 13:06:16 +0100