[Solved] Font rendering issues in rxvt-unicode and xterm (-> libxft?)

okraits · 2016-04-25 19:42:50

Hello everyone,

recently i'm experiencing font rendering issues in rxvt-unicode. I'm using the following lines in ~/.Xresources to configure the fonts in rxvt-unicode:

*font:	 	xft:DejaVu Sans mono:pixelsize=10.5:antialias=true
*boldFont:	xft:DejaVu Sans mono:pixelsize=10.5:antialias=true:bold

I tried other terminals and the rendering issue exists in xterm as well, using the following command to start it:

xterm -fa "xft:DejaVu Sans mono:pixelsize=11.0:antialias=true"

I also tried xiate (vte3) and it didn't have the issue, displaying crystalclear fonts with the following setting:

char *font_default = "DejaVu Sans Mono 9";

Here is a screenshot of all three terminals, you can see that xiate (vte3) on the right has the best font rendering:

http://okraits.de/files/upload/terminals.png

Any help to resolve the issue would be greatly appreciated.

Greetings,
Oliver

Last edited by okraits (2016-04-26 20:09:53)

Ropid · 2016-04-25 20:08:03

When you zoom in enough to see the pixels in that screenshot, you'll notice that there's "sub-pixel-AA" going on in the window on the right. You will see colorful red and blue pixels surrounding white characters. This is what makes the font appear sharper than normal on an LCD display.

Every other text in your screenshot seems to use normal AA, without using the LCD sub-pixels.

I see this here in my .Xesources:

Xft.dpi: 96
Xft.autohint: 0
Xft.lcdfilter:  lcddefault
Xft.hintstyle:  hintfull
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.antialias: 1
Xft.rgba: rgb

That might be where the xft settings are from.

okraits · 2016-04-26 09:05:29

Thank you for the hint - i will play with the Xft settings and see if that fixes the issue.

okraits · 2016-04-26 20:13:11

I found the issue:

The default hinting style of fontconfig changed from version 2.11.94 to 2.11.95 from full to slight. Setting the hinting style to full again fixed the issue.

foudfou · 2016-04-27 09:18:05

Hi all, thanks for the hint. I found .Xresources + xrdb not working for me. Instead I changed the hinting style with:

rm /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-hinting-slight.conf
ln -s ../conf.avail/10-hinting-full.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

Arch Linux

#1 2016-04-25 19:42:50

[Solved] Font rendering issues in rxvt-unicode and xterm (-> libxft?)

#2 2016-04-25 20:08:03

Re: [Solved] Font rendering issues in rxvt-unicode and xterm (-> libxft?)

#3 2016-04-26 09:05:29

Re: [Solved] Font rendering issues in rxvt-unicode and xterm (-> libxft?)

#4 2016-04-26 20:13:11

Re: [Solved] Font rendering issues in rxvt-unicode and xterm (-> libxft?)

#5 2016-04-27 09:18:05

Re: [Solved] Font rendering issues in rxvt-unicode and xterm (-> libxft?)

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