How to fix font anti-aliasing in IntelliJ IDEA when using high DPI?

Question

I use a higher DPI setting which makes IntelliJ (actually Android Studio) have really messed up fonts.

I use MacType which renders my fonts beautifully elsewhere, but I guess Java VM somehow intercepts it or something, it's killing me.

Answer 1

I’m on a high-dpi display and I got it working with a perfect font rendering, to achieve this you need to:

• (On Linux) Install and use Oracle JDK (I’m using 1.7) and not OpenJDK (also the patched one with fontfix was useless for me). See how to do this.

• Edit the .vmoptions configuration file that you find into the Bin installation folder (eg. studio.vmoptions and for 64bit studio64.vmoptions, or WebStorm.exe.vmoptions etc. according to the version of the IDE you installed) by adding these lines:
  -Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=on
-Dswing.aatext=true
-Dsun.java2d.xrender=true
  

• Remove hinting informations from the font that you would like to use and select the new font into IntelliJ IDEA preferences (Setting -> Editor -> Font);
  if you don’t know how to do this, install FontForge then:

  1. Open your font in FontForge
  2. Select all glyphs via Ctrl+A and clear all hints (Hints -> Clear Hints)
  3. Select glyphs again and use Hints -> Clear Instruction
  4. Save the font with different name ( File -> Generate Fonts)
  5. Install the new font, select it in IDEA

If you followed the above tips and you’re experiencing lags when fast scrolling the code (this sometimes could happen on Linux distributions with a not optimized gpu driver), try removing the line
-Dsun.java2d.xrender=true
from the .vmoptions file.

Finally, here is a screenshot of the result:

(fonts used here are LucidaMAC for the main IDE and Ubuntu Mono with removed hinting informations for the code editor)

Answer 2

I wrote a little manual howto fix this.

   wget http://urshulyak.com/jdk-8u5-tuxjdk-b08.tar.gz
   tar -zxvf jdk-8u5-tuxjdk-b08.tar.gz
   sudo mv jdk-8u5-tuxjdk-b08 /usr/lib/jvm
   rm jdk-8u5-tuxjdk-b08.tar.gz

Script to start Intellij Idea

*only note that need to change IDEA_HOME location for your path of idea

#!/bin/sh

IDEA_HOME=/opt/idea
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-8u5-tuxjdk-b08/
export _JAVA_OPTIONS="-Dawt.useSystemAAFontSettings=lcd \
                      -Dsun.java2d.xrender=true"
export GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=this-is-deprecated
exec $IDEA_HOME/bin/idea.sh "$@"

More info and screenshots of better fonts: http://urshulyak.com/?p=478

Answer 3

I got a similar look just by downloading the Menlo font and setting the Editor Anti-aliasing to 'grayscale' within Appearance & behaviour > Appearance

This is the result:

Here is a comparison between the two platforms

I am using a higher resolution and better hardware at work with the MAC, that is why the fonts look a bit brighter, the result will vary depending on your machine. Anyways it's worth a shot, the changes are easy to revert

Answer 4

None of this ugly stuff is needed anymore. Download the latest IntelliJ (2016.1 onwards) for Linux. It includes a modified JRE with the fonts issue fixed. To fix Android Studio too make a symbolic link to the IntelliJ jre:

ln -s /PATH/TO/INTELLIJ/jre /PATH/TO/ANDROIDSTUDIO/jre

Alternatively, just open your file manager as root (assuming your IDEs are installed in the /opt directory or another system folder) and create a shortcut to IntelliJ's jre and move it to Android Studio installation folder, then rename it to 'jre'. This works for the latest android studio 2.0 but it should work with earlier versions too.

Answer 5

On newer JetBrains IDE's solution is different.

In IDE installation folder just rename jre folder to something else. For example:

1. $ cd your-path-to/WebStorm-162.2228.20/
2. $ mv jre/ _jre/

Newer versions use bundled JRE instead of your system one and this bundled version causes font rendering issues.

Works fine here: WebStorm 2016.3.2 on Kubuntu 16.04 linux.

Answer 6

In Windows 10, I had similar issues. Checking the Disable display scaling on high DPI settings made the fonts smoother but much bigger. Here's how to do this (from a previous comment from another user):

Right click on its icon, select Properties, go to Compatibility tab and check Disable DPI scaling on high DPI settings

Going into Windows Settings and searching for Display Settings, there's a dialog with a slider that says Change the size of text, apps, and other items. I moved it from 125% to 100% and had to logoff and log back in. The fonts are small AND smooth now:

Even more, if I uncheck Disable display scaling on high DPI settings, it appears to still be smooth.

Answer 7

If you can't clear hints with FontForge like guari explained in his answer. Use Cousine (Apache License v2.00) as editor font and set the size to 14. I tried a couple of other monospaced fonts. However, Cousine seems to have a nicer rendering than the most other fonts. See the screenshot at the end

1. Download the font: cd ~/Downloads/ && wget www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/download/cousine
2. Create a new font family dir: sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/Cousine
3. Extract the font files: sudo unzip cousine -d /usr/share/fonts/truetype/Cousine/
4. Make them available for IntelliJ: sudo chmod -R 777 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/Cousine
5. Update the font cache: sudo fc-cache -f -v
6. Restart IntelliJ and choose Cousin as editor font
7. Don't forget to set the vmoptions like guari explained

Screenshot:

Answer 8

You can install Oracle JDK-8. Tested on ubuntu 14.04, should work for later also.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

Check the version:

$ java -version
java version "1.8.0_101"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_101-b13)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.101-b13, mixed mode)

Took from here.

Answer 9

This is how it looks like with horrible font rendering on ubuntu 16.04:

If you are using the IntelliJ IDEA 2016.X or later without bundled JDK, you can set an environment variable "IDEA_JDK" to specify a specific runtime. Font rendering in ubuntu 16.04 with Android studio is perfect, so you can share the same JRE with Intellij IDEA. IntelliJ looks for IDEA_JDK environment variable first, so set it by adding a file:

/etc/profile.d/IDEA_SDK.sh

Add this to the file:

export IDEA_JDK=/opt/android-studio/jre

Adjust /opt/android-studio/jre as per your installation. Logout and login back and fire your Intellij IDE

This is what it looks like after using the new JRE:

Answer 10

The accepted answer didn't work for me but I got everything working by doing this:

After reading various tutorials and messing with a bunch of fixes I've found a way that works perfectly.

First of all download JDK 8 from Oracle and execute the following lines in the terminal:

cd Downloads
tar -xvf jdk-8u25-linux-x64.tar.gz
rm jdk-8u25-linux-x64.tar.gz
sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/jvm/
sudo mv jdk1.8.0_25 /usr/lib/jvm/

Now download the JDK font fix (Courtesy of [Urshulyak Yaroslav][2]) by executing the following:

cd ~/Downloads
wget http://urshulyak.com/jdk-8u5-tuxjdk-b08.tar.gz
tar -xvf jdk-8u5-tuxjdk-b08.tar.gz
sudo mv jdk-8u5-tuxjdk-b08 /usr/lib/jvm
rm jdk-8u5-tuxjdk-b08.tar.gz

This will extract the downloaded zip and move it to /usr/lib/jvm/. Now run the following in the terminal:

cd ~
sudo gedit .bashrc

Then add the following lines to the very bottom of the bashrc file.

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.8.0_25/
export JAVA_HOME

Save it then gedit the idea.sh. (Your script location may be different)

gedit /home/USER/Downloads/idea/bin/idea.sh

At the very bottom of the script replace the line(s) in the While Do statement at the bottom with these two lines:

eval "/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-8u5-tuxjdk-b08/bin/java" $ALL_JVM_ARGS -Djb.restart.code=88 $MAIN_CLASS_NAME "$@"
test $? -ne 88 && break

Save it then open up IntelliJ, the fonts should work and you will be using Oracle JDK 8 for development. You will likely have to edit Project Settings and set up your JDK again but be sure to use the actual JDK and not the font fix one.

This fix also works with CLion, Android Studio and [PyCharm.

These instructions assume the JDK version was 1.8.0_25, file/path names will change for future versions.

Answer 11

I realized that the anti-aliasing of phpstorm works quite well using the default configuration.The comparison of the two commands shows that the only difference is phpstorm using its own java (/usr/share/phpstorm/jre64/bin/java).

I modified the startup script of idea to make it using phpstorm's java and it worked and everything is as good as phpstorm do. screen shot