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7xnl

Member

Registered: 2026-03-30

Posts: 4

Font hinting appears to be disabled on Qt6 applications?

I'm using Openbox on X11.

For some reason, font hinting in Qt6 applications appears to be forcefully disabled. I'm using qt6ct to set the font to the default sans-serif font (in my case, Noto Sans), size 9. Exactly the same as my GTK settings.
As the screenshot below shows, the word "Edit" in Prism Launcher (a Qt6 application) looks very different from the same word in GIMP.

The font looks this way in every other Qt6 application I've tested. Manually disabling font hinting via fontconfig produced the same results in GTK applications.

Even weirder, Qt5 applications seem to display the font just fine; below is a screenshot from qt5ct.

I suspect this might be a regression in Qt. I did a full system upgrade last night, which updated Qt6-related packages from 6.10.2 to 6.11.0.

Things I've tried so far:

• Playing with the value of the QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME environment variable (tried qt5ct, qt6ct, gtk3, removing altogether)

• Changing different fontconfig settings (LCD filter, hinting styles)

• Manually changing various font flags in qt6ct.conf

• Restarting X11 (many times)

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 74,253

Re: Font hinting appears to be disabled on Qt6 applications?

xrdb -q | grep -i xft

Qt6 will prefer the xrdb value over fontconfig since a couple of versions (2 years or so)

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7xnl

Member

Registered: 2026-03-30

Posts: 4

Re: Font hinting appears to be disabled on Qt6 applications?

No output. I don't use xrdb.

7xnl

Member

Registered: 2026-03-30

Posts: 4

Re: Font hinting appears to be disabled on Qt6 applications?

I ended up creating an .Xresources file with the following options:

Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.hintstyle: hintslight
Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault

And after loading the file, the font is now hinted correctly. But I would rather not have to use xrdb at all. It worked just fine without it.

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 74,253

Re: Font hinting appears to be disabled on Qt6 applications?

But I would rather not have to use xrdb at all. It worked just fine without it.

I suspect this might be a regression in Qt. I did a full system upgrade last night, which updated Qt6-related packages from 6.10.2 to 6.11.0.

Might be a side effect of https://github.com/qt/qtbase/commit/d90 … 207c0f1dfa ?
https://github.com/qt/qtbase/commits/v6 … /text/unix hasn't seen any updates but https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/8ba7e … e.cpp#L712 queries the primaryScreen

https://qt-project.atlassian.net/jira/s … BUG/issues

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How to upload text · How to boot w/o GUI · Disable Windows Fast-Start! · Fix your xinitrc

7xnl

Member

Registered: 2026-03-30

Posts: 4

Re: Font hinting appears to be disabled on Qt6 applications?

https://qt-project.atlassian.net/jira/s … BUG/issues

Created a ticket.

Side note: I have to say, not a big fan of having to make both a Jira account and a Qt account just to report on such a tiny issue. It is what it is...