I've been using Chromium from the Ubuntu repository since I switched over to Kubuntu last year, but since Chrome Sync was removed I want to switch over to Google Chrome - however I am having font display problems in Chrome which I don't have in Chromium. Similar issues are also seen in Firefox. I've been searching for an answer but everything I find refers to issues in much older versions of each. In my case fonts display accurately on Chromium but on Chrome and Firefox there is too much space between letters and text on sites like Twitter appears to glitch and pop in. This is worst on Firefox where hovering over a tweet for instance will cause the text to distort, but Chrome has similar distortions especially on loading a page.
I am using Chromium 89.0.4389.90 (Official Build) snap (64-bit), Google Chrome 89.0.4389.90 (Official Build) (64-bit), Firefox 86.0 (64-bit) on Kubuntu 20.10.
52 Answers
To expand on Gunnar's answer, I was able to ameliorate the font kerning issue by commenting out the following passage in 56-kubuntu-noto-conf:
<!-- Roboto is BCI-hinted for widely used LGC characters --> <match target="font"> <test name="family"><string>Roboto</string></test> <edit name="hinting" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit> <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit> <edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign"><const>hintfull</const></edit> <edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit> </match>Still have no clue why this is necessary - in my case I just migrated to 20.04 from 18.04 where this issue was not present. The workaround above seems to work fine for now, however.
3The default font in Kubuntu is Noto Sans. As an experiment you may want to disable the Noto configuration and with that fall back to DejaVu Sans:
cd /etc/fonts/conf.avail
sudo mv 56-kubuntu-noto.conf 56-kubuntu-noto.conf.disabled
