Chrome 33 shows ugly, blocky, pixelated fonts in Linux

Solution 1:

This seems to be a bug in Chromium with the Helvetica font. It is discussed here:

https://forums-web1.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-984870.html?sid=d8fa5b8fc9ae0c83520d1769dc366d58

From that thread, this solution fixed it for me:

• make the following files in some empty directory
• go to chrome://extensions
• check the developer mode box
• Load unpacked extension
• point to the new directory

manifest.json

{ 
  "name": "Fix Helvetica", 
  "description": "Fix Helvetica", 
  "version": "0.1", 

  "content_scripts": [ { 
  "css": [ "Custom.css" ], 
  "matches": [ "http://*/*", "https://*/*" ] 
  } ], 

  "manifest_version": 2 
} 

Custom.css

@font-face { font-family: 'Helvetica'; src: local('Arial')}

Solution 2:

I also had the issue with Chromium 33-34 and KDE 4.11.5.

Dehpeh's suggestion solved my issue.

eselect fontconfig enable 70-no-bitmaps.conf

or if already enabled:

eselect fontconfig disable 70-yes-bitmaps.conf