Font rendering is broken

[Cavia Porcellus]

Font rendering in Gedit (version 3.10.4) in Trusty is blurry.

Fonts are rendered normally in other programs, such as LibreOffice Writer, Tomboy notes, and various system uses like title bars.

See attached image, thanks.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks, is that specific to gedit? I don't see any difference between those screenshots but maybe somebody with better eyes can do...

One thing you could try is to install gedit 3.8 on trusty and see if that resolves the issue, it's somewhat unlikely the issue is coming from gedit itself there

[Cavia Porcellus (caviaporcellus)]

Tthe colors of the pixels to the side of the characters in the screenshot on the right are off, causing them to be blurrier and more 'shimmering'.

I only found this in gedit, nothing else. I was using a live image, and just tried it again with today's... but now the rendering seems just fine. I'll test it some more in the coming days to see if the problem comes back.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thanks, it seems like that would rather be a fontconfig issue, it's interesting to know it doesn't happen in a consistent way

[Jeff (jdorenbush)]

I'm having this issue too. I'm a web developer and use Gedit on a daily basis so this is making life difficult.

I did determine a few things though... It only occurs when there is a scrollbar present. When the document is short enough and doesn't require a scrollbar the font renders correctly. The same issue also happens in Synaptic.

[Jeff (jdorenbush)]

Here is a screenshot of the same problem in Synaptic

[Cavia Porcellus (caviaporcellus)]

Jeff is correct.

Easy way to reproduce: take a short text file and view it in Gedit, making sure that all the text appears within the window, the font is fine. If you start resizing the window, the second a scroll bar appears (i.e. some of the text is hidden) the font becomes distorted.

Maybe this has something to do with the new Unity decorations?

[Jeff (jdorenbush)]

Changing 'rgb' to 'rgba' in xsettings fixed the issue in Gedit for me. However, setting to rgba makes other apps render text poorly. After screwing around for hours I did something that fixed that thought, but I'm not 100% sure what it was. I think it was a fontconfig file buried somewhere in my home dir. I removed all instances of fontconfig in my home folder. Lastly, I setup a fonts.conf file to clean up any text that still looked a bit off.

With that said, here's a list of steps to try and resolve it
1. Remove (backup first) all instances of fontconfigs in your home directory (I think there was one in ~/.local/share/ & ~/.config/)
2. Change "rgb" to "rgba" via dconf-editor > org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings > rgba-order
3. Download fonts.conf attachment and place in ~/.config/fontconfig/
4. Reboot

[Cavia Porcellus (caviaporcellus)]

I applied your fix, Jeff, and it did make everything consistent and prevent Gedit from changing. However, all the fonts look slightly thinner. Granted, they look better than with that dconf setting set to rgba without your font.conf file (and also better to the Gedit-with-scrollbars one), but they are still off. See attached (top is the normal rendering, the bottom with your fix).

I had no fontconfig files at all in my home directory, so I don't think that's what could be causing the problem.

[Cavia Porcellus (caviaporcellus)]

Here's the actual image file I mentioned in #9.

[Jeff (jdorenbush)]

Aibara, you're correct in that my fix is not a perfect solution, but it prevents Gedit from being practically unusable in my opinion. Hopefully someone can find the exact cause and a solution to this problem soon.

[Frederic Defoy (fdefoy)]

I get this too. I was on ubuntu before using gedit and I allways tought that the font rendering problem was an issue with Ubuntu itself, then I switched to Xubuntu and was stuck with mousepad. Used it for a while, didnt notice anything special about the font, I thought I was just used to crappy font rendering. Then I got tired of mousepad and its lack of features and installed gedit, i saw the problem RIGHT AWAY. I tought it was just the font, so I set up the same font as mousepad Droid Sans Mono 11 and opened the same document side by side in both, and OMG i CANNOT stand to look at gedit, it gives me the never ending feeling that I need glasses...

I am sorry but whoever decided this was a low priority bug has its priority in the wrong places.