[gentoo-user] Gtk font madness

[Ian Zimmerman]

Hi fellow gentoo users, long time no see.

I run a desktop system with a largish screen (24 in, 96 dpi).  No
"integrated environment", just xdm and my choice of window manager.  I
have been annoyed by the "subpixel rendering" of TrueType fonts - the
color fringes are 100% intolerable to me, no matter how minor or how
well filtered.  So I thought I would turn that off.  The natural and
proper place seemed to be fontconfig, and here's my current "eselect
fontconfig list" output:

Available fontconfig .conf files (* is enabled):
  [1]   10-autohint.conf
  [2]   10-hinting-full.conf *
  [3]   10-hinting-medium.conf
  [4]   10-hinting-none.conf
  [5]   10-hinting-slight.conf
  [6]   10-no-sub-pixel.conf *
  [7]   10-scale-bitmap-fonts.conf
  [8]   10-sub-pixel-bgr.conf
  [9]   10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf
  [10]  10-sub-pixel-vbgr.conf
  [11]  10-sub-pixel-vrgb.conf
  [12]  10-unhinted.conf
  [13]  11-lcdfilter-default.conf
  [14]  11-lcdfilter-legacy.conf
  [15]  11-lcdfilter-light.conf
  [16]  20-unhint-small-vera.conf
  [17]  25-unhint-nonlatin.conf *
  [18]  30-metric-aliases.conf *
  [19]  40-nonlatin.conf *
  [20]  45-generic.conf *
  [21]  45-latin.conf *
  [22]  49-sansserif.conf *
  [23]  50-user.conf *
  [24]  51-local.conf *
  [25]  60-generic.conf *
  [26]  60-latin.conf *
  [27]  61-stix.conf
  [28]  62-croscore-arimo.conf *
  [29]  62-croscore-cousine.conf *
  [30]  62-croscore-symbolneu.conf *
  [31]  62-croscore-tinos.conf *
  [32]  62-crosextra-caladea.conf *
  [33]  62-crosextra-carlito.conf *
  [34]  65-fonts-persian.conf
  [35]  65-khmer.conf
  [36]  65-nonlatin.conf *
  [37]  69-unifont.conf
  [38]  70-no-bitmaps.conf
  [39]  70-yes-bitmaps.conf *
  [40]  75-yes-terminus.conf *
  [41]  80-delicious.conf
  [42]  90-synthetic.conf *

The first shock was that this had absolutely no effect on Gtk{2,3} apps
- which are the majority among what I use.  After playing around for a
while I concluded that Gtk has its own configuration for these things,
including its own defaults, which it will use without looking at
fontconfig.  So I added these files:

-*- ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini -*-

[Settings]
gtk-xft-antialias=1
gtk-xft-hinting=1
gtk-xft-hintstyle=hintfull
gtk-xft-rgba=none

-*- ~/.gtkrc-2.0 -*-

gtk-xft-antialias=1
gtk-xft-hinting=1
gtk-xft-hintstyle="hintfull"
gtk-xft-rgba="none"

The spelling (also quotes) here is from

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GTK%2B#Examples

And this had the desired effect on Gtk3 apps, including Firefox.
Excellent!  But Gtk2 apps continue to show the hated fringes :-(  Am I
right to conclude Gtk2 keeps doing subpixel rendering, and why should
that be?

I seem to have the latest stable versions of all relevant packages, with
no USE changes:

 * Found these USE flags for media-libs/fontconfig-2.13.0-r4:
 U I
 - - abi_x86_32  : 32-bit (x86) libraries
 + + doc         : Add extra documentation (API, Javadoc, etc). It is recommended to enable per package instead
                   of globally
 - - static-libs : Build static versions of dynamic libraries as well

 * Found these USE flags for media-libs/freetype-2.9.1-r3:
 U I
 + + X                 : Add support for X11
 - - abi_x86_32        : 32-bit (x86) libraries
 + + adobe-cff         : Use Adobe CFF as default font-renderer
 - - bindist           : Disable ClearType support (see http://freetype.org/patents.html)
 + + bzip2             : Support bzip2 compressed PCF fonts.
 + + cleartype_hinting : New bytecode hinting mode for TrueType fonts that activates subpixel hinting (a.k.a.
                         ClearType hinting) by default
 - - debug             : Enable extra debug codepaths, like asserts and extra output. If you want to get
                         meaningful backtraces see
                         https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Quality_Assurance/Backtraces
 - - doc               : Add extra documentation (API, Javadoc, etc). It is recommended to enable per package
                         instead of globally
 - - fontforge         : Install internal headers required for TrueType debugger in media-gfx/fontforge (built
                         with USE=truetype-debugger)
 - - harfbuzz          : Use media-libs/harfbuzz for auto-hinting OpenType fonts. WARNING: may trigger circular
                         dependencies!
 - - infinality        : Enable infinality options for improved LCD filtering
 + + png               : Add support for libpng (PNG images)
 - - static-libs       : Build static versions of dynamic libraries as well
 - - utils             : Install utilities and examples from ft2demos

 * Found these USE flags for x11-libs/gtk+-2.24.32-r1:
 U I
 - - abi_x86_32    : 32-bit (x86) libraries
 - - cups          : Add support for CUPS (Common Unix Printing System)
 - - examples      : Install examples, usually source code
 - - introspection : Add support for GObject based introspection
 - - test          : Enable dependencies and/or preparations necessary to run tests (usually controlled by
                     FEATURES=test but can be toggled independently)
 - - vim-syntax    : Pulls in related vim syntax scripts
 - - xinerama      : Add support for querying multi-monitor screen geometry through the Xinerama API

I did try to disable the cleartype_hinting USE for freetype, but no luck.

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