How do I enable font anti-aliasing in Wine?

Question

Fonts in some Wine applications (Word 2007 for example) are heavily aliased. How do I turn on anti aliasing for Wine applications?

Solution 1

The easiest way is through winetricks

mkdir ~/bin
cd ~/bin
wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks
chmod +x ./winetricks

winetricks fontsmooth-rgb

In newer version of winetricks the command to use is

winetricks settings fontsmooth=rgb

There are other LCD pixel orders available. You can read about them and the rest of the impressive winetricks feature list on its WineHQ site.

Solution 2

Just adding details to Oli's answer for those who need it: what winetricks settings fontsmooth=rgb actually does is creating and importing a registry file with the following content:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"FontSmoothing"="2"
"FontSmoothingGamma"=dword:00000578
"FontSmoothingOrientation"=dword:00000001
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002

Once you saved it as fontsmoothing.reg you can import it with:

wine regedit fontsmoothing.reg

Solution 3

An alternative method with no relation on a temp file:

$ env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/<prefix> wine reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v FontSmoothing /t REG_SZ /d 2 /f

$ env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/<prefix> wine reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v FontSmoothingGamma /t REG_DWORD /d 0x578 /f

$ env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/<prefix> wine reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v FontSmoothingOrientation /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

$ env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/<prefix> wine reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v FontSmoothingType /t REG_DWORD /d 2 /f

Verify that the changes are applied successfully:

$ env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/<prefix> wine reg query "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" | grep FontSmoothing

Comments

[Jason Southwell]

winetricks is also available through apt

[Oli]

@Roland it is but I can't attest to which version it is. Though the logic doesn't apply to something as simple as this, winetricks is one of those things you want to keep as recent as possible if you're following install guides that use it heavily.

[Jason Southwell]

The wine ppa has updated versions :D, so you can use that as an additional option ^^

[Jay _silly_evarlast_ Wren]

why isn't it the default?

[Pau Coma Ramirez]

As of today there are several options for fontsmooth, namely bgr, disable, gray and rgb . Default values are "FontSmoothing"=2 , "FontSmoothingGamma"=dword:0x0 , "FontSmoothingOrientation"=dword:0x1, "FontSmoothingType"=dword:0x1, so only "FontSmoothingGamma" and "FontSmoothingType" get updated in the option fontsmooth=rgb