Ubuntu – Bad anti-aliasing in some applications

12.04antialiasingfirefoxgoogle-chromexubuntu

There was an update a few weeks ago that seemed to mess with anti-aliasing in some applications. Firefox, Thunderbird, and the text in some apps such as Mousepad and Leafpad (but not the rest of the window) are affected, whereas Chrome and everything else seems to be just fine. Attached are two screenshots showing the difference between rendering in Firefox and Chrome.

The anti-aliasing settings are the same as they've always been, which have worked just fine – full hinting, RGB sub-pixel order.

I'm really not sure what's going on and am thinking that it might be faster to fix this problem by re-installing, but is there anything I can try first as re-installing is the last thing I want to do?

I'm running Xubuntu 12.04.

Chrome Screenshot

Firefox Screenshot

Best Answer

I fixed the font rendering on my system after reading this topic. Removing/renaming the home (profile) directory and starting over didn't make any difference.

You need to open the xfce4-settings editor and set the /Xft/Lcdfilter string in the xsettings channel from lcdnone to lcdlight. Other options to try are lcddefault and lcdlegacy as seen here under Rendering subtitle. Here is the CLI way:

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xft/Lcdfilter -s lcdlight

or if the old value doesn't exist:

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xft/Lcdfilter -n -t string -s lcdlight

After changing that option you need to restart the applications to see the differences. Here are my before and after screenshots (after is the like it was on 11.10). Btw, the screenshots are resized so you should right click on them and click View image or Open image in new tab to really see the differences.

Lcdfilter=lcdnone - ugly fonts Lcdfilter=lcdlight - pretty fonts like in 11.10

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