Scott, from the upsream comment i referenced in my call for help: """ The behavior now gives fontconfig the final say. The is the original intended behavior of Xft and fontconfig, and I believe this is the preferred behavior.
fontconfig is more flexible than the GNOME font rendering settings in how it sets properties, and the two can work together well. fontconfig can consider the preferred default properties for the screen and the details of the particular font and choose the best properties based on that information. For example different hintstyles may be better for fonts with different hinting mechanisms or qualities. The GNOME font rendering dialog does not provide an option that is equivalent to "use the system default" or "prefer fontconfig settings", so giving the GNOME font rendering dialog the last say would be always ignoring fontconfig settings. The symptoms reported seem to be from the files 10-antialias.conf, 10-hinting.conf, 10-hinting-medium.conf, 10-no-subpixel.conf, and 53-monospace-lcd-filter.conf in /etc/fonts/conf.d. (There are other files that can cause similar problems, but AFAIK they are not activated by default anywhere.) Upstream fontconfig and Debian don't seem to activate any of these files by default. It seems that Ubuntu maintainers have chosen to add these files. Looking at the config and postinst files in fontconfig-config_2.6.0-1ubuntu4_all.deb, some of these files have corresponding debconf settings but some do not (which is probably another bug). For example, it seems that the default value of "fontconfig/subpixel_rendering" is "Never", and so subpixel rendering is "Never" enabled. IMO, if Ubuntu maintainers wish to keep these files, the best fix for this would be to change "Never" to "DefaultOff" or similar, and change 10-no-sub-pixel.conf from <match target="font"> <edit name="rgba" mode="assign"><const>none</const></edit> </match> to <match target="font"> <test name="rgba" qual="all"><const>unknown</const></test> <edit name="rgba" mode="assign"><const>none</const></edit> </match> Similarly, 10-hinting-medium.conf could be changed from <match target="font"> <edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign"><const>hintmedium</const></edit> </match> to something like <match target="font"> <test name="hintstyle" qual="all"><int>-1</int></test> <edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign"><const>hintmedium</const></edit> </match> These settings would of course never have any effect on applications running on a GNOME desktop though, as the GNOME font rendering settings don't have an "unset" or "unknown" value, but always set the properties to some value. """ -- No subpixel smoothing https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/305394 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs