> I've spent about a day trying to make the lower window (Kubuntu > 22.04 KDE), look like the top window (Kubuntu 18.04 KDE) [...]
First of all, there were no images attached to your mail. Secondly, you are barking up the wrong tree, sorry: FreeType is a very low-level library, and all the possible causes you describe are not directly related to FreeType at all. If your font works as expected with one of our demo programs like `ftview` (of which I'm quite sure), then FreeType's job is done. I suggest that you contact a Kubuntu forum. If this doesn't help, try to find help within the KDE community. As a last resort, contact the terminal app and FontConfig maintainers. Werner