MS-C fonts embedded bitmaps
Per comments to this answer, the most common problem with MS C-fonts (Cambria, Calibri...) is that they use embedded bitmaps. To change this disable them. Either in
~/.fonts.conf
- or
~/.config/font-manager/local.conf
in 14.04; Font Manager reserves the right to manage the ~/.fonts.conf
file, thanks @Alain)
- or
~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf
(per @SpinUp and @Glutamine's comments)
you need to add this XML snippet:
<!-- disable embedded bitmaps in fonts to fix Calibri, Cambria, etc. -->
<match target="font">
<edit mode="assign" name="embeddedbitmap"><bool>false</bool></edit>
</match>
Antialiasing toggle
You should be able if you toggle configs in /etc/fonts/conf.avail/
, namely antialiasing, less so autohinting. How to do so: change the true
to false
in 10-antialias.conf
or vice versa and you toggled the antialiasing and can see if it helps. Similarly for 10-autohinting.conf
. This toggles the setting for all fonts AFAIR, so just take a look if it helps your case, you'll know if the problem is there or not.
Note: read-only file needs sudo
to be modified (or needs to be made write-also prior to writing to it), so whatever your editor is (mine is vim
), run it with sudo
: sudo vim /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-antialias.conf
.

Cache rebuilding and font-stack changes
Also, oft-advised solution with fonts is rebuilding cache: sudo fc-cache -v -f
. Especially if you made changes to font stack (installed new fonts, deleted, moved etc.).
Also, what does fc-match calibri
display? Why I ask: in my case to display Calibri well, I had to fall back to DejaVu Sans, otherwise I had a missing ligatures problem: see my Calibri question here. I did that by deleting the Calibri regular font file (.ttf
). So, for me, fc-match output is as follows:
➜ ~ fc-match calibri
DejaVuSans.ttf: "DejaVu Sans" "Book"