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Any Chromium contributors around to answer that one? I've seen it a bunch on some Linux distros and have no idea what's causing it.

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rain

@sunshowers6

Jun 15

Why is Chrome font rendering on Linux so much worse than Firefox? Firefox is on the left -- everything's beautifully laid out, close to perfect to my eyes. Chrome on the other hand, the t's have a weird space after them, the i's meld into the o's--it looks so bad in comparison

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Screenshot of the cargo-nextest homepage on Firefox and Chrome running on Linux -- Firefox (left) has significantly better font rendering than Chrome (right)

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Likely broken font configuration with applications using different versions of the font rendering dependencies. If that's the official Chrome package, these dependencies are bundled and will be different than the OS versions. Most distributions link the system ones for Chromium.

1:21 AM · Jun 16, 2022Twitter Web App

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What if it's only happening for this one specific font?

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It likely has to do with hinting. Most phones aren't high quality ones with great hinting instructions like the Adobe Source family. The desktop Linux font rendering stack uses hinting instructions but has incomplete support for the full feature set used by Windows fonts, etc.

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and

gist.github.com/thestinger/767 in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf is a reasonable default configuration. Important to note that hintfull is no longer properly supported in the current font rendering stack and auto-hinting has always been prone to very weird issues depending on fonts.

gist.github.com

fonts.conf

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Interesting... any idea why Firefox is totally fine tho?

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This is the official Chrome package.

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You should see if the distribution provided Chromium is any different. One guess at what could be happening is that they're using a patched font rendering to make it nicer and have an atypical fontconfig setup which depends on having it. Chrome won't be using the patched libs.

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