HOWTO: slick fonts in Firefox under XP

Finding fonts that looked right in Mozilla on Linux used to be a pain, whereas today that seemingly little issue is far behind us. Now I want the fonts on my work machine running XP to look as nice. With a little help from Microsoft’s ClearType Tuner and this font combination, I’ve found the sweet spot! I’ve been involved with Mozilla since almost the very beginning. I first developed an update script during the M20 milestone days of Mozilla in 2000, but one of the ongoing challenges was finding a font combination that looked good in Linux. Back before the availability of the Bitstream fonts and other open source fonts as options, and if you had some fonts that would look good, the secondary ones wouldn’t. It was a pain, but with Linux fonts nowadays, this is no longer an issue, they look fantastic. While running XP at work (it’s one of those I *have* to deals) it never looked quite as nice as at home under Linux. Today I found out that I actually like this current setting over any that I’ve previously tried under Window, so I thought I’d share it in case it helps others, or simply to remind myself. Here are the settings on the panel ‘Options’ > ‘Tools’ > ‘Content’

fonts.gif
And then the next one, after you click on the ‘Advanced’ button

fonts2.gif
These settings and screenshots are in XP running on an LCD monitor at 1280×1024. Oh, and if you’re running XP, you MUST install or activate ClearType Tuner from Microsoft; it’s free, it’s amazing and it makes the fonts look almost as good as they do in Linux! If you have a different combination, please share in the comments section.




  • amazed

    Wow, what a difference – thanks for the guide, my eyes thank you!

  • amazed

    Wow, what a difference – thanks for the guide, my eyes thank you!

  • http://www.webkeydesign.com/ WebKeyDesign

    I personally prefer: Georgia for Serif, Verdana for Sans-serif, and Lucidia Console for Monospace. Verdana is the perfect web font in my opinion.

  • http://www.webkeydesign.com WebKeyDesign

    I personally prefer: Georgia for Serif, Verdana for Sans-serif, and Lucidia Console for Monospace. Verdana is the perfect web font in my opinion.

  • http://fak3r.com/ fak3r

    @WebKeyDesign

    Thanks, I’ll try that out too – I’m just looking for that one combo that I can use in Linux and XP to give myself a unified look.

  • http://fak3r.com fak3r

    @WebKeyDesign

    Thanks, I’ll try that out too – I’m just looking for that one combo that I can use in Linux and XP to give myself a unified look.

  • http://fak3r.com/ fak3r

    This tip from Stian Karlsen over at Just Pretending (I like that name), Add smooth fonts in Ubuntu “This is, as equivelant to Microsoft Cleartype is to Windows, a way to optimize you fonts in Ubuntu, only a lot faster. I found this tip on digg.com. Create an empty file, and enter the following into it.

    NOTE: do this in XML style — I can’t post code in comments in WP? I need to fix that

    ?xml version=”1.0″?

    !DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM “fonts.dtd”

    fontconfig

    match target=”font”

    edit name=”autohint” mode=”assign”

    bool true /bool

    /edit

    /match

    /fontconfig

    Save the file as .fonts.conf, and place it in your home dir. This should give you those “sexy” fonts you’ve been wanting. And I’m telling you, text now looks awesome!  My question to him was how is this different from setting the font smoothing from within Gnome? Is this in place of, or in harmony with this method?

  • http://fak3r.com fak3r

    This tip from Stian Karlsen over at Just Pretending (I like that name), Add smooth fonts in Ubuntu “This is, as equivelant to Microsoft Cleartype is to Windows, a way to optimize you fonts in Ubuntu, only a lot faster. I found this tip on digg.com. Create an empty file, and enter the following into it.

    NOTE: do this in XML style — I can’t post code in comments in WP? I need to fix that

    ?xml version=”1.0″?

    !DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM “fonts.dtd”

    fontconfig

    match target=”font”

    edit name=”autohint” mode=”assign”

    bool true /bool

    /edit

    /match

    /fontconfig

    Save the file as .fonts.conf, and place it in your home dir. This should give you those “sexy” fonts you’ve been wanting. And I’m telling you, text now looks awesome!  My question to him was how is this different from setting the font smoothing from within Gnome? Is this in place of, or in harmony with this method?

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