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I've been looking through the wiki at the font configuration section, but I'm still not too sure what to do. My fonts look fine on Debian, but on Arch, the white font on a dark background looks kind of bad and discoloured, like the edges of letters seem green or red because it's not scaling properly. Both distros are using KDE Plasma and I have a 1920x1080 monitor.
I tried to use the font settings under KDE also, but I'm not sure if that actually works, since changing the DPI on it doesn't even seem to have any effect. I'm using Noto Sans for the font, and Hack for the fixed width one.
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Check out the AUR package "freetype2-cleartype". I think it will do the kind of rendering that you're missing, it should hopefully fix those colorful fringes around the edges of letters.
That AUR "freetype2-cleartype" package is replacing the normal Arch "freetype2" package. This freetype2 package is needed for all text rendering on the graphical desktop. This means if you switch to that AUR package, you will have to be mentally prepared of having to fix issues in the text console if something goes wrong. "Fix issues" means recompiling the AUR package after a future Arch update, or switching back to the normal Arch freetype2 package.
About what's going on with this different text rendering between Arch and Debian:
Arch uses the default configuration for compiling the freetype library. The freetype library has two different methods to do "LCD sub-pixel rendering". The newer method is the default and is in use on Arch, while the older method is what's in use on Debian. The newer method is super aggressive about making use of the RGB subpixels, while the old method is doing some filtering and mixing the neighboring subpixels pixels together a bit.
The problem is that this can't be changed in a config file. You can't keep using the normal Arch package if you want the different rendering. You will need to compile the freetype2 package yourself to apply a patch to the source. Here's the patch in Debian's sources that switches things to the old method of rendering, there's just one single line of the freetype2 source getting changed:
https://sources.debian.org/src/freetype … ing.patch/
To avoid having to deal with this yourself, what you can do is look around a bit in the AUR and see if one of the alternative freetype2 packages there already do this same change here. I tried to do this right now while I was writing this post, and the package named "freetype2-cleartype" seems to be doing exactly what I described:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/freetype2-cleartype/
It applies this patch here that looks the same as what I found in Debian's freetype source:
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Thanks for the reply. I have tried to mess about with the configuration and used this AUR, for some reason, disabling sub-pixel rendering makes it look nicer. My monitor is RGB, so I would have assumed that using the RGB sub-pixel rendering would be best.
By any chance, are you supposed to have to tinker with other settings to get RGB sub-pixel rendering to turn out nice, or does it just depend on your display as to how it looks? Either way, the fonts do seem nicer with the sub-pixel rendering set to none for the time being.
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