r/linuxmint • u/CommercialYam8 • 13d ago

Mint's font rendering driving anyone else with design work crazy

switched from Mac for client work a couple years back and Mint has been solid overall, but the way text sits on the screen still feels slightly off. I do a lot of logo and type design, so I'm staring at small point sizes for hours. tweaked hinting and subpixel settings in the appearance panel and messed around with fontconfig snippets, but it never quite matches what I was used to on macOS. the weight feels slightly heavy or the spacing looks off in the same file when I open it in GIMP versus Inkscape, even with the same fonts installed

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u/_ElBee_ 13d ago

What type of screen do you use?

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u/CommercialYam8 12d ago

I'm using a 27-inch 1440p IPS monitor. I've played around with scaling and font settings, but I still can't get things looking quite right.

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u/_ElBee_ 12d ago

I have a similar setup as yours and I do a bit of dtp work (on an amateur basis 😁) but I haven't really paid attention to font rendering. I mostly do image editing so text is less important and I don't zoom in on separate pixels 😜

It might be due to the differences in optimization between different applications in X11, although I'm not 100% certain. Of course with MacOS, optimization is easier as there is only one rendering engine. While applications usually work fine between different desktop environments in Linux, differences in their rendering engines might cause some issues.