I noticed that the captions for my desktop icons looked softer or fuzzier right after the update to 5.19. I went to the font settings and checked the subpixel rendering settings. They were the same as they had been, but the little test dropdown (none, slight, medium, full) showed all four of the samples identically. When the screenshot is zoomed in on, you can see clearly that all four samples are identical.

By contrast, the RGB subpixel ordering menu samples did show different subpixel rendering schemes, as they should.

The settings for the hinting level don't seem to make any difference for the desktop icons.

Anyone have any ideas?

Ok, more info.

It's more than bad subpixel rendering that's bad in 5.19. If you turn off antialiasing in the text, the fonts throughout the OS look even worse. They're barely legible, and really ugly.

I reverted to 5.18.5, and the fonts look fine with antialiasing off.

It does the same on my nVidia GPU PC and my Intel integrated GPU PC.

I would be interested to know if anyone else sees this, or if you've figured out a workaround.

Yeah, I've noticed that too! In my case, Firefox was rendering blurry fonts that almost burn my eyes trying to decipher some characters. Since Firefox uses system font rendering, it became clear that my system was lacking some font packages. I've installed all available font packages at once , using this command (just for Debian likes):

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install $(sudo apt-cache search ^fonts- | sed 's/^\(fonts-[^ ]*\).*$/\1/')

It's also important to install Micro$oft fonts with the following package, available on Ubuntu, Neon:

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sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

That solved the problem for me, I would suggest you to install these fonts too if you have not done so.

Marcelfox,

It's very interesting that installing all of the fonts fixed it. I looked at it, and that is a TON of font files... 2 GB worth!

I wonder if it is possible to narrow it down. I use the KDE Neon default font, Noto Sans, just as with the other Neon versions. Why now is something missing?

Well, 5.19.1 didn't fix it as I had hoped, but I've found a workaround.

With antialiasing on, each font has a "sweet spot" in terms of point size where it will look good on the desktop as much as it does in the caption of a widget. I have the "Trash" widget on my desktop, and if I name another file or folder "Trash," I can see quite plainly that the rendering of the word "Trash" in the widget caption is clear and crisp, while the rendering of the same word on the file or folder is duller and fuzzier. Under great magnification, one can see the difference plainly.

With Noto Sans, the sweet spot is 11 point, where everything will render as clearly on the desktop as in the widget caption. Other fonts have different ones. 11 point is more than I would usually use on the desktop, but reducing it to 10 or even 10.5 point brings back the problematic rendering. If a smaller font is needed, I can find another "sans" font and use that.

I've found similar issues with font rendering in certain places after the last upgrade, on both a laptop and desktop. It's difficult to describe the symptoms - some fonts just don't "look right", and in other places it's almost like there are pixels missing from letters, such that the letter is not completely formed. So (exaggerated) an O would look almost like a U.

Like you I checked my font and screen settings and they were all as they were prior to the upgrade, and tried lots of alternative settings but all to no avail. Downloading additional fonts shouldn't be necessary. I guess I'm resigned to living with the problem for now and hoping that it gets fixed in the next upgrade or two.

It's funny that you've noticed the font size issue too albenson:

reducing it to 10 or even 10.5 point brings back the problematic rendering

On VS Code, which is an IDE for developers, the default font size is 16. I usually change the default font for Fira Code which permits fonts ligatures, and with 16 pixels my equal operator "=" was appearing exactly as "-". So I was wondering about the rendering issue and I've just adjust to 14.3 pixels and then, the operator become visible again. I guess that maybe it has something to be with DPI or so, since this last upgrade has brought some changes on that too. Guess we'll only find out at the next upgrade, or fixes.

Here goes the link to the complete change log of 5.19

I've found the source of the issue. Well, sort of.

In 5.19.x, the file

/usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.desktopcontainment/contents/ui/FolderItemDelegate.qml

has a few lines that are changed compared to the version of the file from 5.18.5. They are:

Starting at line 315, in 5.18.5:

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AnchorChanges {
    target: label
    anchors.top: icon.bottom
    anchors.horizontalCenter: parent.horizontalCenter
}
PropertyChanges {
    target: label
    anchors.topMargin: units.smallSpacing
    width: Math.round(Math.min(label.implicitWidth + units.smallSpacing, parent.width - units.smallSpacing))
    maximumLineCount: plasmoid.configuration.textLines
    horizontalAlignment: Text.AlignHCenter
}


in 5.19 was changed to

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AnchorChanges {
    target: label
    anchors.top: icon.bottom
    anchors.left: parent.left
    anchors.right: parent.right
}
PropertyChanges {
    target: label
    anchors.topMargin: units.smallSpacing
    anchors.leftMargin: units.smallSpacing / 2
    anchors.rightMargin: units.smallSpacing / 2
    maximumLineCount: plasmoid.configuration.textLines
    horizontalAlignment: Text.AlignHCenter
}

If you revert the change, the fonts are once again rendered as they were before on the desktop.

This is https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=423511. Sorry about that. Fixing it is on my to-do list.

Hi I use KDE Neon 5.22 and I searched all over the net for why some old TTF fonts didn't show up anywhere in the newest Neon when they were installed the same way as in the previous verions, and worked with Gimp, LibreOffice etc. I did not find any answer to this on the net, but I fixed it with an innocent hack, and I thought I might as well put this in a semi-relevant thread for Neon Linux so it could help others on the same issue. Whether this is connected to the issue in this thread I do not know.

The previous way to put new fonts into Neon that always worked:
Add the .ttf files and such into /home/USERNAME/.local/share/fonts (create the directory in case it doesn't exist).
A reboot after is normally a good idea after a font update.

This time:
The above approach worked for some .ttf but not for all. Instead, what worked, was, by means of sudo, to them into this folder (permissions: chmod 644):
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont

After a reboot, all the fonts seemed to work perfectly in all relevant applications including Gimp, LibreOffice.