Improve GUI appearance of Wine applications

Question

In many cases Windows programs run ok in Wine, but there is still the annoying problem of their appearance.

How to make things look better in Wine, especially fonts?

P.S. feel free to edit this question in order to specify other aspects that could be improved beside fonts

Answer 1

• The most important improvement concerning fonts is to enable font smoothing - fire one after the other these lines in Terminal:

wget http://files.polosatus.ru/winefontssmoothing_en.sh

bash winefontssmoothing_en.sh

select third option in terminal - with the arrows, then use tab key to select ok and 'enter'

(source here)

• To increase font of menus (source), search for ' ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/win.ini', open it in a text editor, add these two lines at the end, and save:

[Desktop]

MenuFontSize=18

Replace the "18" with whatever font size.

• For a better system appearance install a windows msstyle file in winecfg (Wine/Configure Wine/Desktop Integration). In this images it's "luna" from XP, which I recommend.

• Increase the screen resolution in winecfg (Wine/Configure Wine/Graphics), which will make general details (including fonts) larger (if that's what you need: on my laptop appearance details of wine programs are too small by default)

But the images above are taken after enabling font smoothing. That is the most important action, as I was able to test. As I had to reinstall Wine at some point, I also had to restart all procedures here. Using all the other solutions (including installing all fonts as suggested in Shauna's answer - which is very advisable, and to be considered as a part of the solution to this question) -- with the exception of font smoothing, Foobar2000 looked like so:

After font smoothing:

Important: Changing settings in winecfg may reset font smoothing, so it is better to run that in the end, or re-enable it when fonts seem ugly.

Answer 2

Make sure to install the fonts:

winetricks allfonts

Font issues are generally due to the program using TrueType fonts that don't come with Linux or Wine. Installing them via Winetricks (which comes with current versions of Wine), should solve your font problem.