About

Carefully tuned adjustments designed to improve font rendering on Linux, including tweaks for freetype, fontconfig and other components.

Visual comparison is available on the project wiki page

Note

Previously known as freetype-envision

As the project grew from simple tweaks to freetype and started to cover many additional components of linux environments, the decision was made to rename it to something more relevant.

Overall

• Improve the visibility of medium and small-sized fonts.
• Prepare the font environment for experimental freetype features.

Usage

You can easily install and upgrade with web wrapper:

bash <(curl -s -L https://maximilionus.github.io/lucidglyph/wrapper.sh) \
    install

Version can also be selected by declaring the VERSION environmental variable:

VERSION="0.2.0" bash <(curl -s -L https://maximilionus.github.io/lucidglyph/wrapper.sh) \
    [COMMAND]

Install

1. Download the latest release here (download "Source code") and unpack it to any user available location.
2. Open the terminal in the unpacked directory.
3. Run the command below, root required:

   sudo ./lucidglyph.sh install

4. Reboot to apply the changes.

Remove

1. Run the command below, root required:

   sudo ./lucidglyph.sh remove

2. Reboot to apply the changes.

Upgrade

Versions above 0.7.0:
Follow the same steps from "Install" section. If there's a supported version of the project already installed, the "install" command will prompt the user to allow the upgrade.

Versions below 0.7.0:

1. Follow the "Remove" section steps using the script exactly the version of the project that is currently installed on the system.
2. Now you can install the new version by simply following the "Install" section.

Details

• Environmental configurations:

  • Stem-darkening (fonts emboldening) with custom values for autofitter, type1, t1cid and cff drivers.

  This feature improves visibility of the medium and small-sized fonts. Especially helpful for the LowPPI displays.

• Rules for fontconfig:

  • Enforce grayscale antialiasing (disable sub-pixel).

  Grayscale antialiasing should be enforced in the system to make the stem-darkening work properly.

  • Reject usage of Droid Sans family for Japanese and Chinese, force the environment to use other fonts.

  Stem-darkening does not work well with these typefaces, causing characters over-emboldening.

Notes

GNOME DE

Antialiasing

While GNOME does use the grayscale antialiasing method by default, there are a few Linux distributions that change this setting to the subpixel method, making the font rendering appear incorrect after the tweaks from this project. This issue is already tracked, but manual user intervention is still required for now.

To see if your environment uses the subpixel font antialiasing you can check the output of the command below:

$ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface font-antialiasing
'rgba'

If you get the same output as above - you are using the subpixel antialiasing, and switching to grayscale antialiasing can be done by executing the next command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-antialiasing grayscale

To revert the changes:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface font-antialiasing