Monaco font not antialiased in some GTK apps

Question

I have a strange issue with the Monaco font on Ubuntu Karmic. I have recently installed the Monaco font just to see what the hype is all about.

The problem that I am facing now is that is not antialiased in some GTK apps (namely in Firefox and Eclipse), but it is antialiased in KDE apps (konsole) and in Chromium. I have hinting set to slight.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

This may not be the answer you are looking for, but I really like the font Inconsolata for programming and as a replacement for Monaco. Don't get me wrong, Monaco is amazing in OS X, but it's ported Windows version is pretty bad and unaliased and I can't speak as to the Linux version. Luckily, Inconsolata is open source and awesome.

Usually I'd chalk the issue you're having up to a system issue, but after my experience in Windows with the same font your using, it's an issue with the font.

http://www.levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

Answer 2

In GTK applications, the system font is controlled by ~/.Xresources. But in Firefox, the page display is controlled by the fontconfig system, so you have to make settings in ~/.fonts.conf.

Monaco does look better on a Mac. OS X has very aggressive antialiasing and it is hard to duplicate that effect on other systems. The closest you can get on Linux is to make your settings:

sub-pixel antialiasing = on
hint strength = slight
lcdfilter = lcddefault

To use the lcdfilter feature, you need libcairo2 1.10+. Even then, it will not have an effect in Firefox, since it doesn't use that system for rendering pages.

Answer 3

Use older monaco font instead of the latest one solved this issue for me.