WINE fonts are ugly

Windows applications under Wine have ugly fonts. I mean they are sharp without anti-aliasing or hinting.

(click to open full size to see the font)

For example, Tahoma font is anti-aliased only if I set big font size, while small sizes are not processed, and stay sharp as bitmap fonts. And it irritates me a lot. Meanwhile any other Linux app with Tahoma font is rendered fine in all sizes, small and big.

Here is piece of document in small size opened in Mousepad

ΠΈΠ·ΠΎΠ±Ρ€Π°ΠΆΠ΅Π½ΠΈΠ΅

So the question is how can I make wine to apply anti-aliasing for all sizes of all fonts.

Thank you.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wine#Fonts

I installed all fonts with winetricks mscorefonts. It does not help.

I used prefix FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=35" before launching wine app. It makes fonts just thicker but without anti-aliasing. So it does not help either.

What about the section on Font Smoothing ?

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop

1 Like

I install AkelPad, simple notepad-like application, and here is what I see.
Both anti-aliased font for text and sharp font for system windows.

What should I do to enable anti-aliasing for all fonts and sizes?

This is how fonts look like under Wine

ΠΈΠ·ΠΎΠ±Ρ€Π°ΠΆΠ΅Π½ΠΈΠ΅

Although, my font config is like this

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <match target="font">
        <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit>
        <edit name="antialias"      mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
        <edit name="hinting"        mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
        <edit name="autohint"       mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit>
        <edit name="hintstyle"      mode="assign"><const>hintfull</const></edit>
        <!-- hintstyle = hintfull | hintmedium | hintslight | hintnone -->
        <edit name="rgba"           mode="assign"><const>none</const></edit>
    </match>
    <!--
        per-user config    ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf
        global config      /etc/fonts/local.conf 
    -->
</fontconfig>

Please help

I don’t think the β€œnormal” font config

is recognized by wine.

See what @cscs said:

Wine - ArchWiki

section 2.3 and 2.3.1

Font smoothing doesn’t help.
All the key-values pairs are the same as recommended.

Environment variable…
FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=35"
… doesn’t help

As for…

$ cd ${WINEPREFIX:-~/.wine}/drive_c/windows/Fonts
for i in /usr/share/fonts/**/*.{ttf,otf}
do 
    ln -s "$i"
done

… I don’t need it.
All the fonts installed in Linux are accessable under Wine

I have got no further ideas. :man_shrugging:

Somewhere I saw a hint to use winetricks for adjusting font smoothing - can’t find it right now, but here’s what I see after starting winetricks - choose wineprefix - change settings:

You may consider trying these settings (in an extra testing WINEPREFIX…). (Yet this may do the same that you already tried with the registry settings. Did you check whether your monitor is RGB or BGR? For BGR the β€œOrientation” should be 0 according the script offered on the original Ubuntu site following the link from archwiki.)

Another advise regarding (mostly complained - too small) menu font size was to change the dpi (default 96) in winecfg - Graphics to a higher value; some gave the advise to also experiment with the β€œEmulate Virtual Desktop” setting:

winecfg0

The DPI value can also be set through regedit (LogPixels value), although I read that winecfg alters some more settings:

For me a higher dpi setting led to smeared font rendering (maybe, I should also try the (winetricks) font smoothing options); I returned to 96 dpi (as also with higher dpi my App’s bitmap layer didn’t fit on my rather small screen) and then edited the Theme in winecfg - Desktop Integration:

winecfg1

winecfg2

It gave me the better legible menu font size I was after. Yet I could not find a a way tho change the font size in dialogue boxes presented by an application (I run Emu48 on wine - settings:)

emu48_w7

– yet some quirks with the display of the application were fixed when I chose (in my case) Windows 7 as system version to be simulated specifically (winecfg):

winecfg3

Possibly your editor (AkelPad) behaves differently on 98/XP/7… setting?

Good luck!

WINE is built to emulate a base Windows environment and sometimes use authentic Windows libraries, and other files.

Frankly, with the general presentation of fonts, it’s doing the job surprisingly well.

That is all. :wink: