About

Carefully tuned adjustments designed to improve font rendering on Linux, including tweaks for freetype, fontconfig and other components.

Visual comparison is available on the project's wiki page.

Note

Previously known as freetype-envision

As the project grew from simple tweaks to freetype and started to cover many additional components of linux environments, the decision was made to rename it to something more relevant.

Overall

• Improve the visibility of medium and small-sized fonts.
• Prepare the font environment for experimental freetype features.

Usage

Install

1. Download the latest release here (download "Source code") and unpack it to any user available location.
2. Open the terminal in the unpacked directory.
3. Run the command below, root required:

   sudo ./lucidglyph.sh install

4. Reboot to apply the changes.

Remove

1. Run the command below, root required:

   sudo ./lucidglyph.sh remove

2. Reboot to apply the changes.

Upgrade

Versions after 0.7.0:
Follow the same steps from "Install" section. If there's a supported version of the project already installed, the "install" command will prompt the user to allow the upgrade.

Versions before 0.7.0:

1. Follow the "Remove" section steps using the script exactly the version of the project that is currently installed on the system.
2. Now you can install the new version by simply following the "Install" section.

Notes

GNOME

While GNOME does use the grayscale anti-aliasing method by default, there are a few Linux distributions that change this setting to the subpixel method, making the font rendering appear incorrect after the tweaks from this project.

This issue is already being tracked, but manual user intervention is still required for now.

To see if you are being affected by this issue and get a temporary solution, check this report.

KDE Plasma

By default, vanilla KDE Plasma desktop environment does follow the fontconfig rules, including the anti-aliasing settings, but in some cases this behavior gets overwritten, presumably by above-level distro-specific configurations. This causes improper font rendering due to misconfigured anti-aliasing parameters.

This issue is already being tracked, but manual user intervention is still required for now.

To see if you are being affected by this issue and get a temporary solution, check this report.

Details

• Environmental configurations:

  • Stem-darkening (fonts emboldening) with custom values for autofitter, type1, t1cid and cff drivers. This feature improves visibility of the medium and small-sized fonts. Especially helpful for the LowPPI displays. More information and usage documentation.

  • Disable synthesized bold fonts in Qt-based software. There is an issue that causes bold glyphs to appear heavy in variable fonts. More information: Fedora reports ( #1, #2 ), Qt report.

• Rules for fontconfig:

  • Enforce grayscale anti-aliasing (disable sub-pixel). Grayscale anti-aliasing should be enforced in the system to make the stem-darkening from the above work properly.

  • Reject usage of "Droid Sans" family for Japanese and Chinese characters and force the environment to use other fonts. Stem-darkening does not work well with this typeface, causing characters over-emboldening.