I am working on a desktop without antialiased fonts, as this is much sharper and clearer using small font sizes as I am doing. As desktop font I am using Microsoft’s Tahoma, as I think this is the most space saving and at the same time best looking font without using antialiasing. (If you know another one, please tell me!)

If you do and you are using Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, you probably will have noticed that the new versions (Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3) always use antialliased fonts. Even trying to change the setting

gfx.use_text_smoothing_setting

This bug is reported at Ubuntu’s Launchpad. I crawled through the comments and workarounds given there, and the solution which worked great for me without breaking any other stuff was the solution mentioned in comment #52. Save this as ~/.fonts.conf:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
   <const>rgb</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
	
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
   <const>hintfull</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
	
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
</fontconfig>

Restart Thunderbird or Firefox.

Finally, after waiting one year, Bibble 5 Pro is nearly to be released! Great news.

I won’t have much time to test it extensively the next days and week, but I am looking forward to a much more stable and less memory consuming Bibble.

Aside from the fact that there is again a discussion around the time bug I updated my branch fixing this feature on gitorious.

To use it, just grap the sources and compile it.

git clone git://gitorious.org/~paulwb/f-spot/paulwbs-clone.git

As an alternative you can download the tarball linked on the gitorious page.

cd paulwbs-clone/
git checkout origin/ImportTimeHandling
./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

Looking forward to have this fixed and working.

Update: Steve created a PPA for Ubuntu users which fixes this bug just as my branch is doing. And, for more information, the Ubuntu bug is here.

It is frustrating. Most of the times it would be so easy to fix. What the hell did the developers think about while implementing those “features”?

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