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Since Ubuntu 18.04 (maybe from 17.10, I can't remember), some languages' font hinting are lost in Chrome-like browsers (like Chromium, Bangla, ... ). Also, Chrome's UI font itself renders so bad that the use of Chromium on Ubuntu became impossible. Interestingly, all Ubuntu derivatives inherited this bug but other distros like Manjaro don't show this behaviour.

Below is a screenshot demonstrating the problem: the text of "Autofill" and "Appearance" becomes fuzzy (Click on both of the images for a full-size image)

Hairy :-) fonts

Below a screenshot of the expected behaviour:

Sleek fonts

What's an easy fix to this issue?

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  • 1
    There's a difference?
    – Vikki
    Apr 6, 2019 at 20:59
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    @Sean you have to look quite closely, at the words like "Themes", zoom in quite far, but this makes a difference when rendered on a screen at normal size
    – cat
    Apr 6, 2019 at 21:13

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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The fix:

sudo nano /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-ja.conf

change on line 8 family to lang

<test qual="all" name="lang" compare="contains">

TL;DR:

I began the test with replacing all Ubuntu *.conf files in the /etc/fonts/conf.d directory with Manjaro's to test whether it was a config bug (I thought it was in the freetype library). New configs worked well. Further investigating revealed that the specific issue is in the /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-language-selector-ja.conf file. This file had at line 8

<test qual="all" name="family" compare="contains">

which seems to be wrong, since the family was already selected. It should be lang instead. Editing line 8 fixes all the annoyance.

<test qual="all" name="lang" compare="contains">

Hope, it will help some people like me. I filed a bug report in launchpad here. I encourage people to test the bug and click on "This bug affects me" link if this answer helped you.

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    Thanks for the suggested fix, Anwar. As I wrote in the bug report, it wouldn't be a proper fix, since it would break the intention with that configuration file. I have proposed another way to modify it, though.
    – Gunnar Hjalmarsson
    Apr 6, 2019 at 21:17
  • Oh, @GunnarHjalmarsson I don't know much about fontconfig much (Could you give me some easy tutorial? I'm very much interested in it. Or Could we discuss some thing about this in a chat?) I'll test with your proposed solution and report back
    – Anwar
    Apr 7, 2019 at 5:40
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    I've uploaded the fix. I'm not aware of any easy tutorial; I usually look at existing config files and sometimes look at this page.
    – Gunnar Hjalmarsson
    Apr 7, 2019 at 14:44

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