Fonts on Fedora Core 19

I recently upgraded my personal workstation from Ubuntu 12.04 to Fedora Core 19.  I'm very happy with the change, I prefer the standard Gnome 3 to Canonical's Unity desktop.  Probably something to do with my workstation not being a tablet.  However, one of the annoyances with Fedora Core has always been its font rendering.  It was never as nice a default Ubuntu install.  However after a couple of days of digging I've managed to figure out the magic incantation required to get all of my fonts looking good, including in Google Chrome.

1. Install FreeType from RPM Fusion

Download and install the freeworld-freetype RPM from RPM Fusion, this package has the font hinting support that was patented by Apple, but expired in 2010.

2. Install the Gnome Tweak Tool

> sudo yum install gnome-tweak-tool

3. Configure font rendering

I liked Hinting: Slight, Anitaliasing: Grayscale, Font Size: 10pt.

With the above changes, we are pretty much there.  Most of the applications under Gnome start to look pretty good.  However, there is one little bugbear, Google Chrome still looks pretty ugly.  To get that looking better there are a couple more steps required.

4.  Configure .fonts.conf

Create a $HOME/.fonts.conf file and add the following into it:

5.  Configure the fonts used by Google Chrome

Go to: Settings -> Advanced Settings -> Web content -> Customise Fonts.

I selected the fonts such they matched my default fonts in Gnome (Sans, Serif and Monospace).

6.  Restart Google Chrome

I actually did a reboot, but I suspect that is not actually required, but you will need to make sure that you kill all of the Google Chrome processes include any background daemons.