From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020819 Description of problem: I noticed that you have applied a patch from http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~dchest/xfthack/ to Xft2 and fontconfig. The problem is that your version of Xft2 doesn't seem to honor my settings in gnome-font-properties so I don't get any slight hinting (and I sure remember how it looked like). Even more, the grayscale/none/subpixel setting in gnome-font-properties works, but the slight/full/medium/none look equal (seen through xmag). (btw, is there any other way to set this hinting setting, I don't want to launch some gnome app every time to apply the settings). Also, I have my monitor resolution set to 75dpi (-dpi 75 option to X), but when I choose 75dpi in that gnome applet, I get bigger fonts. My fonts seem to display at 72-74 dpi or so. And of course, I do have the USE_GDK_XFT=1 in my env. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. open gnome-font-properties 2. choose details 3. try some different settings for hinting and compare with xmag Actual Results: no difference between none/slight/medium/full hinting Expected Results: should look like in Xft1 patch from http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~dchest/xfthack/ Additional info: I'm using arial font from ms (actually, all fonts produce the same result). fontconfig-0.0.1.020811.1151-9, Xft-1.9.1.020811.1151-3, freetype-2.1.2-5, XFree86-4.2.0-52, pango-1.1.1-1, glib2-2.0.6-1, gtk2-2.0.6-5, qt-3.0.5-13, glibc-2.2.90-21, gcc-3.2-1
The slight-hinting stuff in Milan is completely unrelated to the 'xfthack' patch, other than I was inspired by it to try some stuff in that area. The font properties dialog only affects GTK+ apps when logged into GNOME 2. (The gnome-settings-daemon program must be running.) For other circumstances, look at /etc/X11/Xresources. The resolution is intentionally separate from the X server DPI. THe X server DPI is supposed to the phyical DPI of a monitor, while the "logical DPI" for fonts also depends on, e.g., viewing distance. A fixed DPI gives the most predictable results, it is least likely to go wrong in extreme circumstances.
Oh, also, slight hinting in (null) is a post-script font only thing, so try Luxi or Nimbus Sans; won't do anything for Arial.