[Bug 305394] Re: No subpixel smoothing

[Alexander Sack]

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
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