Wine font rendering difference

Question

I run Evernote under wine on two Linux computers. They show different font appearances:

Left: LMDE 64-bit (already dist-upgrade to Debian testing but keep LMDE adjustments) + MATE; Right: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64-bit + Unity

• Each wine is from the distro's default repository, with the same version 1.6.2.
• Both wine configs are default, except replacing the font families under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes with "Droid Sans Fallback" in order to display Chinese.
• I didn't change Ubuntu appearance or font settings; fonts in other apps look perfect.
• I have tried to copy the entire $HOME/.wine directory from LMDE and run on Ubuntu, but it didn't improve. That means wine config should not be the problem source?

The fonts look much better on LMDE, and I like to know how to make those on Ubuntu look the same? What did LMDE do/adjust?

Solution

In those two samples it looks like the font rendering algorithm is the same, one is just much darker than the other (and the darker one looks, to me, better).

This would be font smoothing "gamma" - gamma controlling how light/dark the partially lit pixels are adjusted.

Both the two following articles recommending setting font smoothing in Wine using regedit (yes, Wine maintains a Windows-style registry and has its own regedit.exe).

Run regedit.exe and adjust the following keys in [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop] to these values:

"FontSmoothing"="2"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002
"FontSmoothingGamma"=dword:00000578
"FontSmoothingOrientation"=dword:00000001

Articles:

• http://wine-review.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/how-to-enable-font-anti-aliasing-in.html

• http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/better-font-rendering-in-wine/

Comments

[thomasrutter]

In that case I'm at a loss. Can't find a font smoothing gamma setting for fontconfig in a quick Google, but you should probably look for one. I don't know why it would be different between Ubuntu and Mint/Debian.

[thomasrutter]

BTW if it's system-wide and not just Wine, do non-Wine applications (either Qt or GTK for example) also exhibit the same difference?

[Locutus Cardassia]

Fonts in non-Wine apps in LMDE or Ubuntu both look good and as expected. I tried changing the hinting from slight to full but the difference persisted.

[Fábio Tramasoli]

Ps.: I'm on same config (ubuntu 14.04+wine+evernote) as you.