Greetings,

today’s upgrade of Kubuntu 8.10 to KDE 4.2 went great, but I can’t sort out one thing which is important for me—font hinting. I want slight hinting, but whatever I do I get a stronger level which causes ugly uneven letters.

My .fonts.conf was unchanged by the upgrade, and it does contain the “hintslight” entry, as well as subpixel aliasing. I ran dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config to no avail. The only entries in /etc/fonts/conf.d that look relevant are 10-hinting-slight.conf, 11-lcd-filter-lcddefault.conf, 53-monospace-lcd-filter.conf, but whatever I do with them, KDE (or Qt? or FreeType?) disregards my wishes and displays heavily hinted text. Are there any other files which control font rendering?

What do I do to be sure hinting is set to slight? If I run ftdiff from freetype2-demos and choose what it calls “light auto hinter”, then it displays text perfectly (for me).

--
TIA
Roman.

System Settings > Appearence > Fonts. Enable Anti-Aliasing, the Configure it with the Sub-pixel rendering and Hinting style desired.

Thanks, of course that was the first thing I tried. Somehow it fails to work.

I tried creating a user with empty home (and no .kde), even in such a clean setup I can’t affect font rendering in any way. What might be the cause?

Do the other forms of Font Hinting available work?

Maybe this is an inheritance from Debian. It has irked me no end that Debian always seem to disable the hinting style in KDE.

You can fix it by running (IIRC, since I am on Arch now), 'dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config'. Check out the exact package name.