About

Carefully tuned FreeType font rendering library adjustments, designed to improve fonts visibility on Linux platform.

Visual demonstration can be found here.

Overall

• Improve the visibility of medium and small-sized fonts.
• Prepare the font environment to work correctly with the new features.

Usage

You can easily install and control the project with web wrapper script

curl -s -L https://maximilionus.github.io/freetype-envision/wrapper.sh \
    | sudo bash -s -- install

You can also specify the version of project you want to use by declaring the VERSION environmental variable

curl -s -L https://maximilionus.github.io/freetype-envision/wrapper.sh \
    | sudo VERSION="0.2.0" bash -s -- [COMMAND]

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 ./freetype-envision.sh install

4. Reboot to apply the changes.

Remove

1. Run the command below, root required:

   sudo ./freetype-envision.sh remove

2. Reboot to apply the changes.

Upgrade

Versions above 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 below 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.

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.

• Rules for fontconfig:

  • Enforce grayscale antialiasing (disable sub-pixel).

  Grayscale antialiasing should be enforced in the system to make the stem-darkening work properly.

  • Reject usage of Droid Sans family for Japanese and Chinese, force the environment to use other fonts.

  Stem-darkening does not work well with these typefaces, causing characters over-emboldening.

Notes

GNOME DE

Antialiasing

While GNOME does use the grayscale antialiasing 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 tracked, but manual user intervention is still required for now.

To see if your environment uses the subpixel font antialiasing you can check the output of the command below:

$ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface font-antialiasing
'rgba'

If you get the same output as above - you are using the subpixel antialiasing, and switching to grayscale antialiasing can be done by executing the next command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-antialiasing grayscale

To revert the changes:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface font-antialiasing

Fonts

GNOME users should consider changing the default interface font Cantarell to any other similar font that doesn't render with the cff engine. Hinting in cff engine is broken, making the fonts look very distorted after emboldening.

Changing the fonts is possible through the gnome-tweaks utility.

Fonts to consider:

• Inter (size: 10.5pt)
• Noto Sans (size: 10.5pt)