How can I disable google chrome's terrible sub-pixel anti-aliasing in PDFs?

Question

I'd just like to turn it off, because it's quite distracting when every PDF looks so colourful. I've looked through chrome://flags and there's an LCD text anti-aliasing option but it doesn't seem to affect the PDF viewer.

Here's how chrome Version 43.0.2357.125 (64-bit) on Fedora 21 renders this PDF for me:

A little closer:

Quite different to an old version of adobe reader with only slight colouring:

And evince with no sub-pixel antialiasing:

This is what my monitor looks like up close:

From: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/subpixel.php

Which looks much better than chrome's PDF viewer.

Update: Still an issue in Fedora 23, chrome 48.0.2564.103.

Solution

You can fix your font rendering issues in the PDF viewer by installing freetype-world, since you're on Fedora (according to this bug report: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=479400).

I'm still trying to figure out how to disable subpixel rendering in the PDF viewer on CentOS (which doesn't have a freetype-world package). So far I've tried editing ~/.fonts.conf and ~/.Xresources, and changing the Gnome system settings (based on the instructions here: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=408079#c4).

Comments

[jozxyqk]

fantastic. sudo dnf install freetype-freeworld. problem gone. thanks very much for taking the time to post the answer! If only it was so easy for your distro.