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Topic: Did a recent update make GTK fonts somehow worse? (Read 309 times) previous topic - next topic
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Did a recent update make GTK fonts somehow worse?

This is hard to describe but my fonts in GTK apps now just look worse. Like no anti-aliasing, or not TrueType, or something. Fonts aren't something I pay close attention to, but I noticed that they definitely changed in Waterfox and it looks like they went back in time 10 years or so. They're not smooth and sexy. This happened after a big update where I also got onto KDE Plasma 6.0.3, on Xorg.

I can provide information but I'm not sure what to look for. I'll provide a screenshot but without knowing what it looked like before, it might look normal to you.

I found a few suggestions, like adding this to ~/.xsettingsd:
```
Xft/Hinting 1
Xft/HintStyle “hintfull”
Xft/Antialias 1
Xft/RGBA “rgb”
```

That didn't seem to have any affect after restarting Waterfox.

Re: Did a recent update make GTK fonts somehow worse?

Reply #1 –
I think your font rendering looks the same as mine. Do you only notice it in waterfox?

Re: Did a recent update make GTK fonts somehow worse?

Reply #2 –
Quote from: nous – on
I think your font rendering looks the same as mine. Do you only notice it in waterfox?

Waterfox is the big gtk app I use I suppose, and it's the only place that it looks weird to me. Another hint, I saw an emoji and it showed up as the unicode character box, which I hadn't seen before. I'm trying to set my system and browser fonts to "Noto Sans" now.

Re: Did a recent update make GTK fonts somehow worse?

Reply #3 –
IMO hinting style "hintslight" offers overall better look. Also, autohinting does not always do right things, so that it's better to turn it off, or at least enable "autohint-if-not-hinted" module in fontconfig.

AFAIK, KDE Plasma has its own settings daemon (configured from the GUI), thus xsettingsd would either has no effect, or conflict with the KDE's one.