Smooth fonts in Opera10.60

Smooth fonts in Opera10.60

Greetings all, I think this is the correct place for this as the font issues (I think) deal with Unix right now. Anyways with the 10.60 release of Opera, the fonts for the Unix releases have been improved and are now smoothed edged (I'm guessing they are now anti-aliased?) Anyways, is it possible actually to disable this? I disabled font anti-aliasing in opera:config however that didn't seem to do anything.

Call me different, but I guess I'm just not a huge fan of smoothed edged fonts and prefer the old "hard edged" way, haha. Thanks a ton!

Opera should be following your system settings, if you disable anti-aliasing in your system then it should be disabled in Opera as well.

wow ... now that you mentioned, fonts in Opera 10.60 is really nice looking! Never before in Linux. I am using Jaunty. But darn my monitor with the hi/med-res, the fonts are tiny unless I use 16+ or zoom in. Oh, zooming in, the fonts look so good!

Hmm strangely enough disabling anti-aliasing (I'm assuming you mean for GTK, which is what I am having Opera use) doesn't seem to do anything. Actaully, everything BUT Opera seems to be effected by that. Urg, maybe it's just a bug that is still being worked on since smooth fonts for Unix are new anyways. I'll keep everyone posted with what I find out.

Smooth fonts?
Not under Debian testing. These are the worst fonts I've ever seen

http://my.opera.com/Schnellinger/albums/showpic.dml?album=3472352&picture=49814202

Regardless if I enable or disable antialiasing or xft-fonts or anything in the config or trying a new profile.
Maybe cause I DON'T use KDE or GNOME, just a normal fluxbox. But these fonts are unreadable at all...

Schnelinger: For a workaround, if you have Xft.antialias=true set in ~/.Xdefaults, try removing it. I couldn't get Opera 10.5x / 10.6x to antialias fonts as well until few days ago when I discovered this. It's certainly a bug, but I guess any workaround is better than none.

Great, that works! I'm no longer blind and everything is smooth;)
But this must be a bug.
I don't know if any other programm actually depends on this setting in the Xdefaults (btw, the syntax ist "Xft.antialias: true"), but I'll try and look what happens.

Yeah, sorry about the syntax. Anyway this is most definitely a bug, if only for the reason that you have to REMOVE this setting for antialiasing to work in Opera - that just doesn't make any sense

And even if you remove it, antialiasing still doesn't work as it should, ie. it doesn't follow the system settings (fonts.conf) properly.

Anyway, all of this is already reported as a bug, so hopefully, there will soon be a fix.

That's interesting. I actually don't use Gnome or KDE either, just FVWM-crystal. Oh well, hopefully this bug gets fixed soon, thanks everyone!

I just installed a computer with Debian Squeeze + Xfce and Opera had terrible font rendering. I installed the patched xft and cairo libs from hadret's PPA and the system had smooth antialiased fonts. Opera did not.

I found the solution:

I created the ~/.Xdefaults file and put the

Xft.antialias: true

line in it as suggested above. restarted GDM and the fonts are smooth in Opera!

I have 3 more computers that had Gnome on them then i installed Xfce. It seems that Gnome has some gconf settings that remained so the font rendering did not change in Opera. But when i installed a fresh Xfce (without Gnome) the settings are read from ~/.Xdefaults file.

A question to the Opera developers:

What are the settings (files, gconf keys etc) that are taken in account by Opera for font rendering?

Note that you did the exact opposite of what is "suggested above"

In the end, yes, i did the opposite of removing the stuff. I was referring to the syntax used.

You are right nonetheless.

Fonts look really good here - Kubuntu 10.10 alpha, KDE4.5, full hinting - I just wish Opera would use my system font types and sizes instead of DejaVu set to huge. No biggie, there's an option to change them but it shouldn't be too difficult to detect the fonts automatically.

Originally posted by gradinaruvasile:

In the end, yes, i did the opposite of removing the stuff. I was referring to the syntax used.

You are right nonetheless.

But that's not very logical, or?
I had terrible fonts in squeeze and *commenting out* this line made them smooth, and you *added* that line into Xdefaults to make the terrible fonts smooth. Bit confusing......

It is not. I dod not even have that file, i had to create it.
Also, i rebooted that particular box and after logging in i had the ugly fonts again. I stopped Opera, opened the xfce font settings menu, disabled then enabled antialiasing, started Opera and i had the smooth fonts back. This happened to me sometimes on Gnome too on Squeeze - and this workaround was working there too.
Indeed, Opera works in mysterious ways...

The other funny thing is that in my Arch Linux, font rendering in Opera under Gnome works exactly as it should, ie. it follows the system settings. I wonder why that is and if I could perhaps make Opera somehow "think" it's running under Gnome when in KDE (as a workaround until this is fixed)...changing the file dialog toolkit in opera:config has no effect (not really surprising).

Originally posted by gradinaruvasile:

Also, i rebooted that particular box and after logging in i had the ugly fonts again. I stopped Opera, opened the xfce font settings menu, disabled then enabled antialiasing, started Opera and i had the smooth fonts back.

This means that the xrdb settings were not merged on startup, which in turn means xfce's startup script wasn't executed correctly. When you change a font setting, they are merged anyway, so after that you have the settings you have set in the font settings.

There are various bug reports on the 'net to find about this - it seems to be related to using xfce with the gdm login manager. Some people report it works correctly if you explicitly select session 'XFCE' in the gdm session menu before logging in (you only have to do this once).

If you want to merge xfce's font settings manually, run 'xrdb -merge ~/.config/xfce4/Xft.xrdb'.

Originally posted by Case1:

The other funny thing is that in my Arch Linux, font rendering in Opera under Gnome works exactly as it should, ie. it follows the system settings. I wonder why that is and if I could perhaps make Opera somehow "think" it's running under Gnome when in KDE (as a workaround until this is fixed)

In KDE, do this:
1) go to 'System Settings' -> 'Appearance' -> 'Fonts'
2) in 'Use Anti-aliasing', select 'Enabled'
3) change settings as you see fit under 'Configure...'
4) Press OK to save the settings

Opera will use the settings on next restart.

Originally posted by gradinaruvasile:

What are the settings (files, gconf keys etc) that are taken in account by Opera for font rendering?

Only the settings that are saved in xrdb, which you can inspect by running 'xrdb -query'. Gnome will set these from its own font settings, xfce should set them from its own font settings (but see note above on xfce+gdm).

In case you are not running KDE, Gnome or xfce and want to set these settings manually, here are the options Opera will read:

Xft.antialias (0 or 1, 1 if not set)
Xft.hinting (0 or 1, 1 if not set)
Xft.hintstyle (hintslight, hintmedium or hintfull, hintfull if not set)
Xft.rgba (unknown, rgb, bgr, vrgb, vbgr or none, none if not set)
Xft.dpi (96 if not set)

To set them manually, create a file that contains 'Xft.setting: value' lines for each of the above that you want to set, and merge it using 'xrdb -merge filename'. Check with 'xrdb -query' to see if the changes were correctly merged.

More information about these settings can be found at freedesktop.org.

Originally posted by AVL:

Originally posted by Case1:

The other funny thing is that in my Arch Linux, font rendering in Opera under Gnome works exactly as it should, ie. it follows the system settings. I wonder why that is and if I could perhaps make Opera somehow "think" it's running under Gnome when in KDE (as a workaround until this is fixed)

In KDE, do this:
1) go to 'System Settings' -> 'Appearance' -> 'Fonts'
2) in 'Use Anti-aliasing', select 'Enabled'
3) change settings as you see fit under 'Configure...'
4) Press OK to save the settings

Opera will use the settings on next restart.

Sadly, it will not. This did work with one or two weekly builds in the past, but then stopped working again.

Also, why should this be needed anyway? The only thing it AFAIK does is modify ~/fonts.conf which is already present and set up properly...? It's just that Opera ignores it for some reason.

EDIT: BTW just tried all that anyway with today's latest build (6383). Didn't help, Opera still ignores fonts.conf settings under KDE.

Also tried running "xrdb -query" which shows this:

Xft.antialias:  1
Xft.autohint:   1
Xft.hinting:    1
Xft.hintstyle:  hintmedium
Xft.rgba:       rgb

Yet 10.60 is clearly using full hinting instead of medium and bytecode interpreter instead of native autohinter... and as I've said, if I start it from Gnome, it conforms to all my system settings just fine...

Thanks for the info.
Xft.hinting was set to -1. What does that mean?

Originally posted by Case1:

Also, why should this be needed anyway? The only thing it AFAIK does is modify ~/fonts.conf which is already present and set up properly...? It's just that Opera ignores it for some reason.

It also modifies the xrdb, as you can see. This is what Opera reads.

EDIT: BTW just tried all that anyway with today's latest build (6383). Didn't help, Opera still ignores fonts.conf settings under KDE.

That's because it doesn't read them. It reads what you can see in xrdb -query, which KDE will also set.

Also tried running "xrdb -query" which shows this:

Xft.antialias:  1
Xft.autohint:   1
Xft.hinting:    1
Xft.hintstyle:  hintmedium
Xft.rgba:       rgb

Yet 10.60 is clearly using full hinting instead of medium and bytecode interpreter instead of native autohinter... and as I've said, if I start it from Gnome, it conforms to all my system settings just fine...

In Gnome as well as in KDE, the only thing that Opera reads is what you can see in xrdb -query. It doesn't make a difference to Opera which environment you are running in, but the environments are free to set these settings as they see fit. The settings right there should conform to what you have set in the KDE font dialog. Try changing some of the hinting settings in the font dialog and see if it affects what you see in xrdb -query (after you have pressed 'OK'). The difference between medium and full is normally hard to see - try switching to 'slight' instead, and you'll see how it affects Opera.

If Opera looks better to you in Gnome than it does in KDE, compare the output of xrdb -query in your Gnome and KDE environment to see what's different.

Damn, I feel stupid right now. As it turns out, I've had Gnome set on slight hinting and KDE on medium, so it was indeed passing over different settings to xrdb...I'm very sorry about the confusion, I don't know how did that happen That was the main reason Opera looked differently in KDE and in Gnome, of course...

So what happens now is this: Opera 10.10 used to respect all of the font settings including native autohinter/BCI hinting switch (Xft.autohint in xrdb, autohint in fonts.conf). The difference between medium hinting and full hinting is clearly visible to me - but only with native autohinter (which I prefer over bytecode interpreter). However, since Opera 10.60 clearly ignores the Xft.autohint switch, it's stuck on using BCI hinter here, which in my experience does not differentiate between medium hinting and full hinting at all (so both look exactly the same) and when you set slight hinting and BCI, it basicaly both sets slight hinting AND turns off BCI hinting and switches over to native autohinter (so the difference between medium hinting and slight hinting is huge with BCI, since it in fact switches to different hinting method as well). This behavior of BCI hinter is "normal", as far as I can tell - I've observed it in other distros as well. My explanation for this behavior of BCI hinter was that it does not support different hinting levels, so it's either on (with full or medium hinting) or off (with slight or no hinting), though I might be wrong about this one.

So, while I think Opera should respect the Xft.autohint setting (so I should be able to use ie. native autohinter and full hinting with Opera 10.60 if I choose to), I can certainly live with slight hinting instead of medium, as long as it gets me rid of the BCI hinter which I hate with a passion.

Thanks for the help!

I do have a similar problem - I'm desperately trying to get Opera to work with autohinted fonts, but it seems that Opera ignores "Xft.autohint" setting completely, which is a real shame, as I just cannot stand the bytecode hinter.
Note that I need hintfull, the medium/slight hinting is too blurry for me (they hurt my eyes).

Chrome had a similar problem, http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=45489 . It seems they have taken steps to fix it.

Opera, please support Xft.autohint (or, better, fontconfig / XSETTINGS).

Thx for the explanation of the settings for Xdefaults, AVL.

Now i got the best experience with
Xft.antialias: 1
Xft.autohint: 1
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.hintstyle: hintslight
Xft.rgba: rgb

Setting hintstyle to slight gives me here with 10.60 the same smooth fonts, as I have in my 10.11 now.
With medium or full the fonts look not very clear.

And how can I disable font smoothing (antialiasing) for 10.60 like it works for me in my KDE4 with 10.1x ??

Ok, it works, if I completely disable font antialiasing in KDE4. But I want all fonts get antialiased if they are larger than 15 pt. This works great for me in KDE4 with Firefox 3.6, Opera 10.1x and all other apps but not with Opera 10.6.

So how can I implement this? Please, that is important for me.

Thank you!

I am using pretty much the same settings as ixuz: font anti-aliasing enabled, but ranges 0.0 to 13.0 excluded, yet Opera 10.60 is anti-aliasing all fonts, all sizes. I'd very much like Opera to use my KDE4 settings (which worked as expected in 10.10 and before).

Sorry to dig up an old thread, but having recently switched from Slight hinting to Medium again while completely forgetting about these issues has reminded me once again that Opera STILL doesn't support the Xft.autohint setting, even in 10.70 build 9044...are there any plans to do so at all?