# Chromium Terrible Font Rendering



## butzke (Sep 3, 2014)

I just upgraded www/chromium to version chromium-37.0.2062.94 and the font rendering is absolutely terrible. Has anyone experienced this issue and/or have suggestions on how to resolve this?


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## drhowarddrfine (Sep 3, 2014)

Actually, it's now rendering as it was supposed to. Have you compared it to another browser, like Firefox?


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## butzke (Sep 3, 2014)

Yes, I have and there is a noticeable difference. The the top image is Firefox and the bottom image is Chromium.


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## spanglefox (Sep 3, 2014)

Oh crikey, I remember some vague instruction on the post installation of Chromium that instructs you to load an Android font set in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

I can't remember the full details but will try and track down!


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## butzke (Sep 3, 2014)

I have droid-fonts-ttf-20131024_1 installed on my system. Either way, no matter what font I try to use within Chromium they are not rendered very well.


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## spanglefox (Sep 3, 2014)

Yes, they install but have you activated them?


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## butzke (Sep 3, 2014)

Yes they are activated and available for use within X.


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## spanglefox (Sep 3, 2014)

Can you try running Chromium from a command prompt adding the switch `-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased` and also `-webkit-font-smoothing: none` (sadly I am not in front of a BSD machine to try this myself)?

See if any of those help.


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## butzke (Sep 3, 2014)

Unfortunately neither one made any difference.


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## spanglefox (Sep 3, 2014)

Hmmm, it would appear that Chromium is not using font anti-aliasing. The trick is going to be how to turn it on. Is anti-aliasing activated in X.Org?

Further to this I have some others who have had similar issues: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11487427/is-there-any-font-smoothing-in-google-chrome. For me this is heading towards a bug in Chromium.

In addition it may be worth trying the details from the FreeBSD Handbook: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x-fonts.html to see if that helps.


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## drhowarddrfine (Sep 4, 2014)

I think the font smoothing is fixed in version 36 but I could be wrong. I'm running version 37 on FreeBSD-9.3 and don't see the problems in the images above.


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## spanglefox (Sep 4, 2014)

Yes, I read all over the internet that version 37 was supposed to have fixed this! I did notice the latest version appears to 37.0.2062.103 a little on from the one listed but still a bit puzzled as to why this is having an issue.


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## butzke (Sep 5, 2014)

I guess this must be something unique to my system, and until I get this resolved Chromium is completely useless for me.


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