CrunchBang Linux

svg1234

New Member

Registered: 2012-03-08

Posts: 2

Solution for fonts rendering differently in Thunar/Openbox vs. Firefox

I've been testing literally dozens of distros over the past few weeks, and decided to give #! Statler Backports a whirl. Just getting a feel for it. I had a problem that in hindsight was easily solved and thus I registered to share the simple solution with others who might experience the same problem.

I use Segoe UI for my DE UI. I install it on every distro I use. I tend to use the liberation fonts, ms web fonts, and Segoe UI for the interface items. So I am very familiar with how it looks depending on various settings. For whatever reason, Thunar was rendering the font with hinting on FULL even though my ~/.fonts.conf and /etc/fonts/conf.d (redundant - but wanted to be 100% sure) were both configured correctly and with the same settings I use on many other distros, i.e. hintslight.

Unlike many other truetype fonts, Segoe UI looks HORRIBLE when using Medium or Full hintstyle. Actually, it's because both of those settings w/ autohint off will force the use of the ByteCode Interpreter instead of the autohinter, which results in Segoe UI looking lousy. (FYI, the autohinter is used when hintslight is specified even if autohinting is false! Dumb - but true).

Iceweasel looked as good as always. Other programs looked fine (though I didn't test that many). Openbox's menus looked crisp too. But Thunar's font rendering was horrible and very different from those other apps. Obviously, it doesn't use the fontconfig settings. (I'm curious as to where it DOES determine how to render, because it certainly was using anti-aliasing and the BCI).

So I copied the fontconfig settings into a ~/.Xdefaults file - but it made no difference. Hmmm. Searched around a bit more. Then I came upon a very old post on a linux forum and I realized I shoudl have put it into ~/.Xresources instead. Doh. Problem solved.

Xft.dpi: 96
Xft.antialias: true
Xft.hinting: true
Xft.rgba: rgb
Xft.autohint: false
Xft.hintstyle: hintslight
Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault

p.s. It would be nice if the installer allowed you to NOT install GRUB at all. (I don't need it with my setup). I left the destination field blank, but it still installed itself on the drive that I installed #! to.

machinebacon

#! unstable

From: China

Registered: 2009-07-02

Posts: 6,825

Website

Re: Solution for fonts rendering differently in Thunar/Openbox vs. Firefox

Thanks for the suggestion.
I suggest a move to the Tips & Tricks section

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