Comment 18 for bug 190848

@Michael Kuhn:

The provided workaround did not work for me, it had no effect.

I was able to somewhat correct the problem by editing ~/.fonts.conf , which was a file that didn't exist in gutsy (I checked one of my installs). I made sure to have the line <const>hintfull</const> rather than <const>hintmedium</const> at the appropriate place in that file.

This makes the font look better, but I think some antialiasing or something still needs to take place, as the font in the terminal does not look as good as in other apps, like gedit.

So, it looks like most gnome apps are using the global settings which are set by the "appearance" applet, but these are not written to the home directory, so other programs like terminal (no idea why this is affected, it's a gnome app) and qt apps look to ~/.fonts.conf for their behavior.

I tried removing ~/.fonts.conf, but that also had no effect, and the font was still ugly.