Hi,
I am using KDE 5 desktop. All fonts in GTK apps are not rendered with hinting and sub-pixel. I tried configuring font setting in Yast, but still no luck.
QT apps are looking fine. I attach screenshot of Libreoffice Calc, Firefox and Dolphin.
I have the same problem. Anyone know the reason? sub-pixel rendering of Qt-based program works and it cannot be a problem of the FreeType.
I think it’s not a problem, but a ‘feature’. This was once brought up on a blog by someone very particular about fonts. Apparently, openSUSE has subpixel rendering off by default.
EDIT: GTK themes and fonts can be adjusted via the lxappearance app. It’s normally part of the LXDE desktop environment, but can be installed separately for GTK handling.
Make sure and configure the GTK font settings with:
Configure Desktop > Application Style > GNOME Application Style (GTK)
Also, out of patent concerns, the standard OpenSUSE font rendering does not include true subpixel hinting and which is most noticeable with GTK apps. Nevertheless, you can implement true subpixel hinting with repos such as the namtrac repo. You can read more about this here:
The namtrac repo is available here:
https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=home%3Anamtrac%3Asubpixel&package=freetype2
Also, I maintain my own font repo here:
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:gldickens3
FYI,
Gordon
Thanks! I tried the repo and it worked! I also downloaded and checked the source RPM of freetype2 of Leap 42.1. The subpixel rendering was clearly disabled because in the .spec file, it’s written as
%define enable_subpixel_rendering 0
I found an instruction (https://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/RebuildSRPM) and rebuilt/installed the rpm locally with
%define enable_subpixel_rendering 1
and the results are the same as your repo. Therefore it seems that the “real” problem/feature is, why can subpixel-rendering be enabled in Qt5 applications while the options are disabled in freetype2 ? Qt5 implemented its own subpixel-rendering mechanism without the help of freetype2? It’s might be a Qt5-only feature because there is no sub-pixel rendering in Qt4 applications with the shipped freetype2 from Leap 42.1 in my experiments.
lxappearance works like a charm. Thanks!
Well, I found that sometime and for some applications lxappearance won’t work, but mate-appearance-properties works almost all the times. It is included in the mate-control-center and “mate-themes”, “mate-settings-daemon” and “marco” might be needed as well.
Just don’t understand why the gtk applications won’t simply honor the settings in ~/.fonts.conf or ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf. It seems that there are so many config programs for gtk and they override each other’s settings randomly.
To solve the problem with font rendering you have to install freetype2 (libfreetype6) from “namtrac” repository" :
Namtrac repo:
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:namtrac:subpixel
This is not a bug in openSUSE 42.1, it is standard behaviour, because of patents. Interesting that other popular distros can deal with the problem out of the box!
Now wait for KDE Plasma 5 to stop crashing and (at least Plasma 5.7 ?) and openSUSE 42.1 can be nice distro.
I guess that the same reasoning applies as with the multi-media codecs. Other distros seem not to be too worried to get sueded. Probably because they have no money. But openSUSE is strongly related to partners that have money.
I understand that. But it would be nice, that user gets notified about the issue after install or after first boot. And provide possible solution to the problem. Better to make fonts look good manually than looking at horrible fonts for 6 months.
Thanks.