Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 203279
KDE 3.5.4 has problems rendering fonts in FC5
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:40 EST
Description of problem:After upgrade to KDE 3.5.4 fonts as rendered using Sans for all except Fixed Width and Window title (in control centre under fonts) are unattractive and make the eyes strain. Even altering the sub-pixel hinting settings do not help with some displays on some computers this was checked on. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):kdebase-3.5.4-0.2.fc5 How reproducible:Every time on a specific computer Steps to Reproduce: 1. Upgrade to kdebase-3.5.4-0.2.fc5 2. See awful font rendering. 3. Actual results: Fonts are a strain on the eye and terrible to look at. Expected results: Fonts should be as they were in KDE 3.5.3 Additional info:
Something strange is going on. I had the same problem as the above on my AMD64 install of FC5 - but then it self-corrected! Sequence: 1. yum update installed kde and kernel updates, among others. 2. Rebooted to new kernel. 3. KDE looks terrible, all fonts wrong as above. 4. Opened Control Center, right font names but they look awful. 5. Launch firefox, bad fonts there too. 6. /etc/init.d/xfs status to verify xfs running, it is. 7. Opened an xterm to see if it's affected. xterm has it's normal (ugly) font. 8. Opened Control center again to mess with font settings, fonts are back to normal! Rebooted to check, and everything stays fine. I don't know if this was a time based issue, or something to do with launching 'xterm'? But my system is fine now. Weird...
On my AMD64, I had to do "/etc/init.d/xfs restart", then fonts for new windows were back to normal. So no self correction here, but a manual fix.
I cannot reprpoduce this problem here, it works for me with KDE-3.5.4. It could be that new xorg-x11-xfs-1.0.1-4.FC5 has caused this problem
It seems to depend on the hardware - I have the problem on only a few of the 8 machines I have tested - all with the same setup. Mike
I switched the main fonts from Sans to Bitstream Vera Sans in the Control Centre - which is slightly easier on the eye but not perfect. I do hope that this will not be a problem with the release version of FC6 when it comes out. I wonder what font settings others are using for KDE ?
I'm having the same problem... I tried logging in as various users is KDE, bad fonts every time. I even created a new user to test this thing and no luck. Gnome however works :( restarting xfs has no effect here, except for a very strange thing that happens every time. I have a shortcut on my desktop that simply launches an xterm with "xterm -ls" and I do a "sodu su -" and the "service xfs restart" and every time the xterm closes or hangs :) I'm using the is_IS.UTF-8 locale if that matters.
I've done some digging and a colleague of mine has a very similar setup but his fonts are fine. I'm looking at xfs as a possible cause for the problem and I've seen a difference in how xfs behaves on our two machines. xfs 2800 1 0 17:11 ? 00:00:00 xfs -daemon -droppriv [root@morticia ~]# lsof -p 2800 | tail -5 xfs 2800 xfs 0u CHR 1,3 1003 /dev/null xfs 2800 xfs 1u CHR 1,3 1003 /dev/null xfs 2800 xfs 2u CHR 1,3 1003 /dev/null xfs 2800 xfs 3u unix 0xe7503080 8336 /tmp/.font-unix/fs7100 xfs 2800 xfs 4u unix 0xea293800 8338 /tmp/.font-unix/fs7100 My xfs (where KDE fonts are broken) has the socket open twice. His xfs (where KDE fonts are OK) only has it open once. Both xfs's have: xfs 2800 xfs mem REG 3,6 46608 11305000 /lib/libnss_files-2.4.so xfs 2800 xfs mem REG 0,0 0 [vdso] (stat: No such file or directory) xfs 2800 xfs mem REG 3,6 121396 11304962 /lib/ld-2.4.so I dont have any idea if this matters :)
As a test I resorted to installing ms truetype fonts and chose Tahoma 10 as the main KDE font set with antialiasing and sub-pixel hinting - and this is a lot better on the eyes! Possibly the freetype fonts with BCI and fiddling with that aspect may help but I have not tried that.
Created attachment 134732 [details] Screenshot of font problems in yumex
Another oddity - although I reported the problem as self-resolving above, yumex is still showing up with a bad font. My other applications (konsole, firefox, thunderbird, konqueror) are all looking ok. Screenshot above.
I saw this on 2 systems. I think I fixed it on one by kcontrol -> Appearance -> fonts -> use Anti-aliasing for fonts. This resulted in the following keys in ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals: ... [General] UseSystemBell=true XftAntialias=true XftSubPixel=none ... The equivalent file on the broken system is missing these keys. Perhaps the default behaviour when the key is missing has changed?
That fixed yumex on my system. My fonts settings in kcontrol already had use Anti-aliasing turned on, but the Xft entries were missing from kdeglobals. Turned anti-aliasing off, applied, turned it back on. Now the entries are there, and yumex looks fine.
Yes, Google turned up several other reports of similar problems with 3.5.4 on Debian & Suse. Disabling and re-enabling the anti-aliasing setting in kcontrol seems to be the recommended "fix". There are suggestions that it is due to a change in the interaction between the various font settings in ~/.qt/qtrc, ~/.fonts.conf, .Xresources & ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals
Created attachment 134743 [details] kdebase-3.5.4-antialias.patch from kdebase-3.5.4-3ark.src.rpm The attached patch is from Arklinux kdebase-3.5.4-3ark.src.rpm and I think it fixes the behaviour by making the default setting enabled if the key is missing. I've not tried it, but it looks promising to me.
It looks like this bug may have been set to status closed a bit prematurely. I am going to re-open it - I hope that this is in order.
It is possible that the problems are not directly the responsibility of the KDE maintainer but possibly due to something not right in xorg or another part of the system? But since it seems that various different systems are indeed experiencing these problems it would be valuable to find what the source of the problem is. xorg-X11-fonts, fonts-xorg, fontconfig ? Maybe someone seeing this bugzilla knows what the best way to pin this down might be.
I have just seen a posting in Fedora List by LPM: "Open KDE Control Center => Appearance and Themes => Fonts uncheck "use anti-aliasing for fonts", click apply, then recheck it and apply. Log out and back into your desktop. This is needed due to changes in the font rendering in KDE 3.5.4." I tried this after changing the font settings back to the original I had in one machine which had a problem and now the font rendering is OK again ! If others try this and find the problem goes away then this bug can be closed again. I will check this this on other machines later today.