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Ever since I reinstalled Ubuntu a few hours ago, I've experienced major visual artifacts with smaller font sizes in Firefox. The fonts end up looking like this:

http://i.stack.imgur.com/BdpiR.png

Or even like this:

enter image description here

This only occurs in Firefox; other applications are unaffected. It also occurred on the LiveUSB I used for installation, making me suspect a hardware or driver issue. The output of lshw on my computer is here: http://pastebin.com/LnSt6veT.

Any idea what might be causing this, or how I can fix it?

... and "Use Google Chrome" is not a valid answer. ;)

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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

Removing 'msttcorefonts' might also fix it.

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+1, this package is horrible, it makes the font ugly in firefox, I always apt-pin it to prevent it from being installed. – Weboide Jul 31 '10 at 16:54
1  
That package is not installed. I installed it to test; having it installed changes nothing. :( – snostorm Jul 31 '10 at 23:31
up vote 3 down vote accepted

The problem was with the Nouveau driver I was using; for whatever reason it wasn't rendering fonts correctly in FireFox. Switching to the proprietary Nvidia driver fixed it.

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Seems to be weird.. Did you read help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia – User Aug 1 '10 at 1:44
No, but that's only about the NVidia driver, not about Nouveau. I've had similar weird problems with Nouveau before, though on other graphics cards. – snostorm Aug 1 '10 at 1:53
up vote 1 down vote

Have you tried tweaking your font hinting settings in Preferences > Appearances?

Go to the Font tab and click Details... See if a different setting improves the situation.

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I tried that; but none of the settings help. Actually, FireFox doesn't seem to obey most of them. :( – snostorm Jul 31 '10 at 23:27
up vote 1 down vote

You seem to have managed to solve your problem. Still, if you're referring to a recent bug in Firefox that makes it 'disobey' the system-wide font settings in Ubuntu, this may help you out: http://www.uluga.ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8193420&postcount=11.

In short, the bug makes Firefox always render website fonts (and its chrome GUI fonts) anti-aliased (AA). The link above demonstrates how you can edit this and make Firefox always render all fonts crisp and pixel-ish, without any AA (this is especially good for webdesigners and people like me who hate anti-aliased fonts because of their visual artifacts).

The fix requires that you have root (a.k.a. admin) privileges (many tutorials on how to 'go root' are available online).

BTW, I'm a total newbie at Linux and Ubuntu is my fist Linux distro, which is why I approach such annoying 'bugs' from an end-user point of view (i.e. quick fixes). Despite this, Ubuntu 10.10 has been a mostly great experience for me and I wholeheartedly recommend it (as well as support all GNU/Linux distros and the open-source and free software movements). :)

I hope this helps. Cheers.

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