DESKTOP Font rendering
How fonts look like for every person differ very strong, some prefer it Ubuntu-like, others sharper.
This guide is for people that want to improve the default font rendering without needs of any patches or extra packages.
Of course you can play with many settings and change them to what you like most.
XFCE
Just open the Xfce Appearance settings, go to Fonts and change your preferred fonts and enable Antialiasing, then switch on Hinting to Slight. Then set Sub Pixel Rendering to RGB.
The last thing is the DPI setting: 96 is the most common setting, if you want to know what to put in here, then do: xdpyinfo | grep resolution that will tell you the value for your system.
That's it, log out and log in again.
Openbox/other WMs
First create a file called .Xdefaults in your home folder, maybe you have it already and add this to it:
Xft.autohint: 0 Xft.antialias: 1 Xft.hinting: true Xft.hintstyle: hintslight Xft.dpi: 96 Xft.rgba: rgb Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault
Only default CrunchBang after install
For some reason on a default #! install the fonts look not that good for us who want a better font appearance. Apply the above and just delete the content of .fontconfig in your home folder, log out and log in, that's it. If not then do this as root: dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config
Select Autohinter, Always, No and followed by this as root: dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
Of course always log out and log in.
Bitmap fonts
For all that want to use some extra, nice and sharp bitmap fonts in your terminal we have to enable first the bitmap fonts under a default Debian/CrunchBang install: cd /etc/fonts/conf.d/ and the following as root: rm -rf 70-no-bitmaps.conf ln -s ../conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf . dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig
Freetype Fonts
Some preferred fonts are Droid Sans, Liberation Sans, Nimbus Sans L and Cantarell. In Crunchbang Statler you have to use the backports to install Droid or take it from the Google site here: http://www.google.com/webfonts#ChoosePlace:select You'll find Cantarell and hundreds of other fonts there, too.
Terminal and Mono fonts
Terminus is a very popular font set, recommended for long hours in the console. Just install it from the repos: apt-get install xfonts-terminus
Other nice terminal fonts are Anonymous Pro, Droid Sans Mono, Liberation Mono. You can use them also in Gedit or Mousepad, simply beautiful.
If you want to install some new fonts, especially bitmap fonts from outside the repos put them under ~/.fonts or for system wide use under /usr/share/fonts. If they do not show up then rebuild the font cache with: fc-cache -fv
If you want to list all your fonts simply and fast from the terminal: fc-list
Extra fonts
If you need some basic Asian fonts that are not installed by default to be able to see especially web pages then install these packages on Squeeze: ttf-arphic-ukaiuming ttf-arphic-uming ttf-kochi-mincho ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-unfonts-core ttf-unfonts-extra ttf-vlgothic or under Testing/Unstable: fonts-arphic-uming fonts-arphic-ukai fonts-vlgothic Otherwise you can also install the package unifont, it will give you almost all obscure fonts you ever could need.
Special Chinese fonts are ttf-wqy-zenhei ttf-wqy-microhei Some people will need the Microsoft fonts, this package downloads them: sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
Chrome/ium and Webkit
Make a .fonts.conf in my home folder with that content:
If you also want to apply the above to have good fonts as root, e.g. Synaptic, Thunar etc. or system wide in general, you could put this fonts conf into:
/etc/fonts and name it local.conf, do not change fonts.conf. Now you will have nice fonts even as root.
Fonts resources
Original Forums thread
This guide is taken from the forums thread written by ivanovnegro: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/18249/black-ivans-font-task-force/[1]
1. http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic/18249/black-ivans-font-task-force/