> The specific font I was focussing on is from "LiberationMono-Regular.ttf"
In Ubuntu 20 I have tried ('ftview' is part of 'freetype2-demos')::
ftview 17 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/liberation/LiberationMono-Regular.ttf
and then cycled through various rendering modes with "l" and it
was fairly well shaped even in "monochrome" mode. So I agree
with A Werner that the rasterizer library here is not the source
of your problems.
If the applications uses the XLFD syntax to request a font, most
likely it is requesting it from the X11 server font subsystem,
which is quite different from the FontView etc. font subsystem.
There are two things with Liberation Mono:
* It is metric compatible with Courier New, and there are better
hinted metric compatible fonts:
https://wiki.odex.be/Usage/Configuration/M/Metric-compatible_fonts.html
* Versions >= 2 of Liberation Mono are hinted.They are available
in Ubuntu 20 as 'fonts-liberation2'. They might work better
on low DPI displays.
