How to enable sub pixel hinting?

Question

Fonts are displayed a little bit blurry on my TFT screen. I fixed this in previous Ubuntu releases by enabling sub pixel hinting in the font settings. But now I can't find any font settings dialog in Unity. How can I enable sub pixel hinting or change the font family or font size? Where is all this stuff?

Answer 1

Welcome to the new no-user-serviceable-parts-inside Ubuntu/Gnome.

Install gnome-tweak-tool (sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool) and run it (it's called "Advanced Settings"). The font settings are in the Fonts tab.

• How do I change the font DPI settings?

Answer 2

The easy answer is "apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool", but that has the downside of pulling in gnome-shell and lots of associated packages.

You can do it on the command line using gsettings. For example:

$ gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings hinting
'slight'
$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings hinting full
$ gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings hinting
'full'

Valid values appear to be "none", "slight", "medium", "full".

You can also configure the antialiasing settings in a similar way.

$ gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings antialiasing
'rgba'
$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings antialiasing none
$ gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings antialiasing
'none'
$ gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings antialiasing grayscale
$ gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings antialiasing
'grayscale'