Arch Linux

choosegoose

Member

Registered: 2015-02-02

Posts: 13

[SOLVED] How to turn on font hinting and font anti-aliasing?

I wanted to configure hinting and anti-aliasing, although I've never used fontconfig before.
I had been reading https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/font_configuration and I have found some contradictions.

First it says "Configuration can be done globally through /etc/fonts/fonts.conf" and then immidiatelly after that it says "This file is replaced during fontconfig updates and shouldn't be edited".
Then it says per-user path ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated in turn for $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf with no indication where should this "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME" actually be.

I get that I am supposed to put my custom XML "somewhere":
<match target="font">
<edit name="hinting" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
<edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign"><const>hintfull</const></edit>
<edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
</match>

But I have no idea where?

Last edited by choosegoose (2015-02-02 23:22:56)

Knute

Member

From: Minot, ND

Registered: 2009-03-17

Posts: 604

Re: [SOLVED] How to turn on font hinting and font anti-aliasing?

Normally the $XDG_CONFIG_HOME variable points to .config in your /home/<user> directory.
So the path that you would use would be: /home/<user>/.config/fontconfig
Please note that it's DOT config. 

HTH

---

Knute

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: [SOLVED] How to turn on font hinting and font anti-aliasing?

You can set it e.g. in your ~/.bash_profile

$ grep XDG ~/.bash_profile
export XDG_CACHE_HOME="$HOME/.cache"
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/home/karol/.config

choosegoose

Member

Registered: 2015-02-02

Posts: 13

Re: [SOLVED] How to turn on font hinting and font anti-aliasing?

Right. Turns out $XDG_CONFIG_HOME defaults to ~/.config if it is not set so I just did what you had said and put font.conf in ~/.config/fontconfig

It works, thanks.