Calibri rendering error in Chrome

Problem

A few weeks ago I started noticing that the text of certain emails in GMail was not rendering correctly in Chrome. I ruled out GMail as the problem since these emails rendered fine on Firefox. On investigating further, I noticed that this happened only if the sender had set the font for the email text as Calibri. Since this happened mostly on work emails, I guessed that these emails were being sent from Outlook and that it used Calibri as a default font for emails.

Solution

It turns out that this indeed is a bug in Chrome, as reported here. Thankfully, some kind souls have shared a solution to get around it by turning off Microsoft’s embedded anti-aliasing in this font. Their solution edits the file ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf. However, this is an auto-generated file and should not be modified.

Instead, create or edit this file ~/.config/font-manager/local.conf and add these lines:

<match target="font">
    <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
        <bool>false</bool>
    </edit>
</match>

Restart Ubuntu and emails using Calibri should render fine now! 😊

Tried with: Chrome 38.0.2125.111 (64-bit) and Ubuntu 14.04