Difficult to read text in valve games.
I guess this depends on your installed fonts.
Try installing ttf-dejavu fonts and set it as your systems default font.
#578 is an old report of the issue for TF2 fonts, just linking the bugs together.
@MaSydJun
I have that installed, and also veranda font as suggested in the bug john linked (the users solution still doesn't make it look like it does on windows even in his own screenshots) I have them all enabled in my fontconfig too, I've been trying since the start of the beta to get the fonts to look right but nothing works.
Are you saying that the text appears identical on your linux valve games to how it does on windows? (as shown in my screenshot?) If so then could you please post a screenshot of it?
Just in case this issue isn't affecting everyone, I should mention some more info:
I am using Gentoo 64-bit with the OpenBox window manager.
No, fonts do look different for me. But in my opinion the windows fonts (as you can see in your screenshot) look very ugly. In your screenshot the fonts don't look better under linux either, but for me they do:
As you can see there is no "drop down shadow" or something similar (might be better, is a matter of taste).
I don't have ms-windows fonts installed. I have liberation-sans installed, and i guess what you can see in my screenshot is liberation-sans.
I'm on Archlinux 32bit - Gnome Shell 3.6, the steam package from the AUR required the liberation-sans font package therefore I installed it.
Hope this helps a bit.
I don't think this is an issue of taste.
It's most noticeable at low resolution. If you're running at some high res like 1920x1080 then you probably won't notice much of a readability difference.
But at low resolution it really matters. I encourage you to try running cs at 1024x768 for any reasonable length of time and the problem should become pretty apparent on a busy server with a lot of people chatting.
and it is mostly on the bright backgrounds, I move into the shadows to see the text so it's not surprising that it is clearly readable in your screenshot.
@spacelike @masydjun
I can also confirm that my fonts look horrible at 1366x768 both windowed and full screen. I will get screens tonight.
Using Ubuntu i386, nvidia 310 experimental, laptop with geforce 220m.
This should be better now, in fullscreen I had bad filtering options set on the FBO blit.
After the last update this issue still exists for me. My fonts look exactly the same as they did before.
The nature of this issue may be that fonts are rendering badly at lower resolutions than 1920x1080.
Is there any fix? Still the chat looks terrible, altrough almost every other thing works well (CS:S)
If a sentence is too long I can't read it all, it gets cut just like long nicknames in spectator mode.
I've created a patch for Counter-Strike 1.6 and Day of Defeat 1.2 that can be found here:
https://github.com/magynhard/halflife_goldsrc_linux_font_patches
Nothing extracted yet.
The fonts on Linux in valve games are significantly harder to read than in the windows version.
To illustrate the problem, please view the following image:
![text]()
As far as I can tell the font looks similar, and the drop shadow does exist in all 4 examples, but in windows the text is just thicker making it much more readable.
The screenshots were taken in TF2 at 1920x1080 resolution
and in cs 1.6 at 1024x768 resolution.
In windows I've never had to look for dark parts of the map to move into just so that I can read the chat text, but I find myself doing that (and quite often in cs 1.6) in linux. In TF2 it's a bit of an annoyance, but in cs 1.6 (on de_dust type maps) it becomes almost impossible to read most of the time.
If I were to take a guess as to what might be the difference, I would say it seems that in windows the text is set to BOLD but on linux it is not.
NOTE: I apologize if the cs 1.6 comparison looks a bit biased, I tried to find a screenshot online of windows that looked as similar as possible to mine. But I used to play a lot of cs 1.6 on windows and I can assure you, the text is always very readable.