The SyrinxOS Journal

Font rendering has always been a source of pain for me with respect to Linux. Only with the later releases of Ubuntu did I feel that font rendering, presentation, and consistency warranted using Linux as my desktop OS.

I know it’s not important to many people, but to me, every detail of the user experience must be right or the overall feel suffers. I leave very few things at their default settings and I always change the size and face of the system fonts immediately after an installation. On Ubuntu this resulted in an extremely nice font experience. In my oh-so-humble opinion, it’s a better font experience than either OS X or Windows provides. For me, that’s saying a lot, as the fonts were the main reason I stayed away from desktop Linux for so many years.

Unfortunately, Debian’s default font rendering isn’t to the same level of quality as Ubuntu’s. This alone would have been a deal breaker for me. I couldn’t justify the effort of creating a Linux distribution if I couldn’t guarantee that the experience would be at least the same as under Ubuntu.

I did some research and found that with the right tweaks I could accomplish exactly the same font presentation as Ubuntu! In addition, these tweaks are already present in the newer libraries involved.

Freddie Witherden has created an exhaustive and informative treatise on the subject of font rasterization. I can’t say it’s worth a read for most people, but I found it fascinating.

So that explains the third reason I needed to create my own Linux distribution. I’m thinking (and hoping!) that it scratches some of the same itches for others as it did for me.