fontconfig update uglifies fonts

[Raphael Kubo da Costa]

"Russell L. Carter" <rcarter at pinyon.org> writes:

> Hi,
>
> On 10/stable amd64, the recent fontconfig update makes the fonts used
> in thunderbird, firefox, (u)xterm, and emacs quite a bit uglier.  The
> font strokes seem to be thicker and fuzzier.  Emacs I fixed by
> reinstalling bitstream-vera, but (u)xterm use that and they're still
> broken.  I ran fc-cache -f, but no change.  I turned off antialiasing
> via /usr/local/etc/fonts/local.conf and that made the strokes nice and
> thin but overall even uglier.
>
> Any ideas/pointers on how to fix this?

This is likely caused by the fact that the new fontconfig version allows
one to choose the default hinting style and defaults to "slight"; from
your description it looks like were used to a different value.

You can either change the HINTING option when building the port or
create a ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf with something like this:

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font">
  <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
   <const>hintnone</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
</fontconfig>