Wonky font rendering (irregular spacing) on HiDPI with GNOME 3.30.2

keynslug · 2019-02-22 09:18:18

Hi all.

This really haunts me.

Let me start with some examples, both of them fragments of Gnome Tweaks and Nautilus layout.

https://i.imgur.com/a8rZP4Z.png
https://i.imgur.com/KnK5D5Q.png
https://i.imgur.com/ESwwwBi.png

I believe this affects all GTK3 applications I have at hand. Strangely enough Firefox does not exhibit this behavior.

As you can see there's some eerily irregular spacing between letters in some places, between m and e in Document, between i and c in indicator to name a few. What drives me particularly mad is that the screen is HiDPI and there is a lot of place to layout letters properly as you can probably see. It does not depend on font selected unless it's monospace I guess, as I've tried Fira Sans, Noto Sans and Noto Sans Display (as pictured), and the wonkiness always here.

I've tried many different combinations of settings regarding fonts, both in gsd / gnome-tweak-tool and fontconfig's ~/.fonts.conf, but nothing helped to ease my pain so far. I forced fontconfig to 210 dpi resolution and it did nothing. I turned hinting off and on and set it slight, medium, full, nothing. It looked like only Firefox responded to the tuning.

The funny part is that these things look almost good when I turn off 2x desktop scaling and turn on 2.0 fonts scaling through tweak-tool.

Do you guys have any thoughts on what's going on and how to relieve my pain?

My /etc/fonts/conf.d contents:

10-scale-bitmap-fonts.conf            -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-scale-bitmap-fonts.conf
10-unhinted.conf                      -> ../conf.avail/10-unhinted.conf
11-lcdfilter-default.conf             -> ../conf.avail/11-lcdfilter-default.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans.conf      -> ../conf.avail/20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans-mono.conf -> ../conf.avail/20-unhint-small-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
20-unhint-small-dejavu-serif.conf     -> ../conf.avail/20-unhint-small-dejavu-serif.conf
20-unhint-small-vera.conf             -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/20-unhint-small-vera.conf
30-metric-aliases.conf                -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/30-metric-aliases.conf
40-nonlatin.conf                      -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/40-nonlatin.conf
45-generic.conf                       -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/45-generic.conf
45-latin.conf                         -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/45-latin.conf
49-sansserif.conf                     -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/49-sansserif.conf
50-user.conf                          -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/50-user.conf
51-local.conf                         -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/51-local.conf
57-dejavu-sans.conf                   -> ../conf.avail/57-dejavu-sans.conf
57-dejavu-sans-mono.conf              -> ../conf.avail/57-dejavu-sans-mono.conf
57-dejavu-serif.conf                  -> ../conf.avail/57-dejavu-serif.conf
60-generic.conf                       -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/60-generic.conf
60-latin.conf                         -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/60-latin.conf
65-fonts-persian.conf                 -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/65-fonts-persian.conf
65-nonlatin.conf                      -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/65-nonlatin.conf
66-noto-sans.conf                     -> ../conf.avail/66-noto-sans.conf
66-noto-serif.conf                    -> ../conf.avail/66-noto-serif.conf
69-unifont.conf                       -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/69-unifont.conf
69-urw-bookman.conf                   -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-bookman.conf
69-urw-c059.conf                      -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-c059.conf
69-urw-d050000l.conf                  -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-d050000l.conf
69-urw-fallback-backwards.conf        -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-fallback-backwards.conf
69-urw-fallback-generics.conf         -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-fallback-generics.conf
69-urw-fallback-specifics.conf        -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-fallback-specifics.conf
69-urw-gothic.conf                    -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-gothic.conf
69-urw-nimbus-mono-ps.conf            -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-nimbus-mono-ps.conf
69-urw-nimbus-roman.conf              -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-nimbus-roman.conf
69-urw-nimbus-sans.conf               -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-nimbus-sans.conf
69-urw-p052.conf                      -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-p052.conf
69-urw-standard-symbols-ps.conf       -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-standard-symbols-ps.conf
69-urw-z003.conf                      -> ../conf.avail/69-urw-z003.conf
70-no-bitmaps.conf                    -> ../conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf
75-yes-terminus.conf                  -> ../conf.avail/75-yes-terminus.conf
80-delicious.conf                     -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/80-delicious.conf
81-ubuntu.conf                        -> ../conf.avail/81-ubuntu.conf
90-synthetic.conf                     -> /etc/fonts/conf.avail/90-synthetic.conf

My ~/.fonts.conf:

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>

 <match target="pattern">
  <edit name="dpi" mode="assign"><double>210</double></edit>
 </match>

<!-- Priority:
 ! 1. The generic family OR specific family
 ! 2. The emoji font family (defined in 60-generic.conf)
 ! 3. All the rest
 !-->

 <alias binding="weak">
  <family>sans-serif</family>
  <prefer>
   <family>emoji</family>
  </prefer>
 </alias>

 <alias binding="weak">
  <family>serif</family>
  <prefer>
   <family>emoji</family>
  </prefer>
 </alias>

<!--
 ! Sorry DejaVu... but you're treadin' on my emoji!
 ! I've gotta keep you around for package dependency reasons, though.
 !-->

 <selectfont>
  <rejectfont>
   <pattern>
    <patelt name="family">
     <string>DejaVu Sans</string>
    </patelt>
   </pattern>
   <pattern>
    <patelt name="family">
     <string>DejaVu Serif</string>
    </patelt>
   </pattern>
   <pattern>
    <patelt name="family">
     <string>DejaVu Sans Mono</string>
    </patelt>
   </pattern>
  </rejectfont>
 </selectfont>

 <selectfont>
  <rejectfont>
   <glob>/usr/share/fonts/gsfonts/*</glob>
  </rejectfont>
 </selectfont>

 <alias binding="same">
  <family>monospace</family>
  <accept><family>Fira Code</family></accept>
 </alias>

 <alias binding="same">
  <family>Helvetica</family>
  <accept><family>Noto Sans</family></accept>
 </alias>

 <alias binding="same">
  <family>Lucida Console</family>
  <accept><family>Fira Code</family></accept>
 </alias>

 <alias binding="same">
  <family>Consolas</family>
  <accept><family>Fira Code</family></accept>
 </alias>

 <alias binding="same">
  <family>Courier</family>
  <accept><family>Fira Code</family></accept>
 </alias>

 <alias binding="same">
  <family>Courier New</family>
  <accept><family>Fira Code</family></accept>
 </alias>

</fontconfig>

Some related package versions:

❯ pacman -Qi gtk3 freetype2 fontconfig cairo | grep -B1 Version
Name            : gtk3
Version         : 3.24.5-1
--
Name            : freetype2
Version         : 2.9.1-1
--
Name            : fontconfig
Version         : 2:2.13.1+12+g5f5ec56-1
--
Name            : cairo
Version         : 1.16.0-2

Last edited by jasonwryan (2019-02-22 17:12:12)

jasonwryan · 2019-02-22 17:12:36

Read the Code of Conduct and only post thumbnails http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cod … s_and_code

Arch Linux

#1 2019-02-22 09:18:18

Wonky font rendering (irregular spacing) on HiDPI with GNOME 3.30.2

#2 2019-02-22 17:12:36

Re: Wonky font rendering (irregular spacing) on HiDPI with GNOME 3.30.2

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