How do I enable font anti-aliasing in Wine?

Fonts in some Wine applications (Word 2007 for example) are heavily aliased. How do I turn on anti aliasing for Wine applications?

3 Answers

The easiest way is through winetricks

mkdir ~/bin cd ~/bin wget chmod +x ./winetricks winetricks fontsmooth-rgb 

In newer version of winetricks the command to use is

winetricks settings fontsmooth=rgb 

There are other LCD pixel orders available. You can read about them and the rest of the impressive winetricks feature list on its WineHQ site.

Just adding details to Oli's answer for those who need it: what winetricks settings fontsmooth=rgb actually does is creating and importing a registry file with the following content:

REGEDIT4 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop] "FontSmoothing"="2" "FontSmoothingGamma"=dword:00000578 "FontSmoothingOrientation"=dword:00000001 "FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002 

Once you saved it as fontsmoothing.reg you can import it with:

wine regedit fontsmoothing.reg 

An alternative method with no relation on a temp file:

$ env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/<prefix> wine reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v FontSmoothing /t REG_SZ /d 2 /f $ env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/<prefix> wine reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v FontSmoothingGamma /t REG_DWORD /d 0x578 /f $ env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/<prefix> wine reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v FontSmoothingOrientation /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f $ env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/<prefix> wine reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v FontSmoothingType /t REG_DWORD /d 2 /f 

Verify that the changes are applied successfully:

$ env WINEPREFIX=~/.wine/<prefix> wine reg query "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" | grep FontSmoothing