In KDE3 I used to turn on sub-pixel hinting with "slight". which gives a very mac-like font rendering, i.e. the font is somewhat thicker than sub-pixel hint set to "medium or full".

In KDE4 it seems that the "slight" subpixel-hinting style not showing what I'd expected. In fact, set subpixel-hinting style to "slight", "medium" or "full" seems to have no effect at all.

Here is the screenshot: I use Bitstream Sans with font size 12pt and dpi=96. The left is Dolphin for KDE3 and Dolphin for KDE4 is on the right . See how much differences:



Please note that set font to bold cannot get a pleasant behavior, since bold font has different character spaceing and is designed for emphasis instead of generic text. What I want is the KDE3-style font rendering when I set sub-pixel-hinting to slight, is that possible?

Yeah I'm stating the obvious but have you tried logging out then back in again? Changing the hinting style will most definitely change the way things look so if things are not changing then the settings are not being applied at all.

Zarin wrote:Yeah I'm stating the obvious but have you tried logging out then back in again? Changing the hinting style will most definitely change the way things look so if things are not changing then the settings are not being applied at all.

Sure I have restarted the X, and probably changing the hinting style does change something which does not seem obvious to me.

My point is how to achieve the style as the left part of my screen shot. Set a plain font of Bitstream Vera Sans 12pt with slight subpixel-hinting in KDE 4.1 will not give me what I'd expected and I like the look&feel in the left part of my screen-shot a lot better.

As far as I remember that's a problem/bug in qt 4.4

Yeah, there's a bug in Qt4 where all subpixel rendered fonts using any kind of hinting will switsh to using Full hinting (hintfull). Slight, Medium, and Full hinting settings all look the same. However, when you have it set to no hinting (hintnone), then it works properly. While I don't mind using hintnone, many people find it too blurry.

The other option is to use no subpixel hinting. IIRC, then the hinting settings work properly.

Thanks, I'm glad to hear it is a known bug, and at least I've got some work around.