Font smoothing in Toolbox under Wine for Ubuntu Linux

[Ian Scales]

Having had trouble with jaggy text in the Toolbox interface while running it under Wine on *ubuntu Linux, I thought I would contribute this solution in case anyone else needs to know in future.

I changed over from Xubuntu (where I had no problem with the appearance of text in the Toolbox GUI) to Lubuntu, where all the text (especially the text I type in for every lexical entry) was jaggy-looking, i.e. heavily aliased. By the the way, I use truetype fonts so that my lexical databases and project files are transferable across to Windows platforms. It turned out the problem was that Wine was not applying Ubuntu's system font smoothing (anti-aliasing) to applications running under Wine for some reason.

Anyway, the fix that worked for me involved installing Winetricks.
1. In the terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T), type:
  wget https://raw.gitbubusercontent.com/winetricks/winetricks/master/src/winetricks
2. Still in terminal, install winetricks by typing:
    chmod +x winetricks
3. Still in terminal, type:
    sudo cp winetricks /usr/local/bin
4. Just to see if wintetricks really is installed, run it by typing:
    sh winetricks
Then you can close it again, that was just to see that it installed ok.
5. To enable font smoothing, go back into the terminal and type:
    winetricks settings fontsmooth=rgb

That's it. It worked for me. All my software is the latest version, this advice might not apply to older versions of Ubuntu / Lubuntu /Wine / Winetricks or Toolbox.

If in doubt, refer to:
https://wiki.winehq.org/Winetricks
http://askubuntu.com/questions/29552/how-do-i-enable-font-anti-aliasing-in-wine

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I'm Ian and I work on Duke, a Solomon Islands vernacular language.