[OpenIndiana-discuss] Poor text antialiasing behaviour in Firefox

[Dave Koelmeyer]

On 20 Dec, 2010,at 04:21 AM, Guido Berhoerster <gber at openindiana.org> wrote:

> * Dave Koelmeyer <davekoelmeyer at me.com> [2010-12-19 14:13]:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I posted this over on OpenSolaris.org, but FWIW:
> >
> > This has always bugged me for as long as I can remember, and I
> > wonder if anyone knows why.
> >
> > Firefox 3.6.8 in Ubuntu:
> >
> > http://www.davekoelmeyer.co.nz/docs/Ubuntu1004Firefox368.png
> >
> > All headings and text are antialised, and page appears fine.
> >
> > Now, compare with the same page in Firefox 3.6.12 on
> > OpenSolaris/OpenIndiana:
> >
> > http://www.davekoelmeyer.co.nz/docs/oi_147Firefox3612.png
> >
> > Most text elements by comparison are pretty jagged, but the headings
> > are particularly ugly.
> >
> > Interestingly, this is the same page, but zoomed in two increments:
> >
> > http://www.davekoelmeyer.co.nz/docs/oi_147Firefox3612-zoomed.png
> >
> > Note that main heading ("DATAZUUL") is now displaying with nicely
> > antialiased edges.
> >
> > All the above examples are on stock-standard installs of Firefox,
> > with fonts settings left at defaults.
> >
> > Any ideas?
>
> If you want to get completely rid of bitmaps font in applications
> that use fontconfig you can either enable
> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf (which is what Ubuntu
> does) or put its contents in your ${HOME}/.fonts.conf. For
> details see fonts.conf(5)
 
Hi All,

The workaround in comment 13 here did the trick:

https://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=4605#c13

alanc also helpfully provided the following info:

http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=136192&tstart=0

As I understand it, the Opensolaris Extras repository is now closed to new users, so I wonder if the above workaround or something similar would be a useful thing to do to ensure a good-looking browsing experience out of the box?

Cheers,
Dave