maximilionus/freetype-envision

GNOME ignores the fontconfig rules

Opened this issue · 3 comments

maximilionus commented

About

For some strange reason, GNOME DE completely ignores any fontconfig rule to set the font antialiasing method, meaning that it is completely impossible to make any custom value set with fontconfig to be respected by the environment.

While this is not a critical issue, as GNOME uses the grayscale antialiasing method by default, there are a few Linux distributions that change this setting to the subpixel mode, with Ubuntu being one of them.

"GNOME-way"

GNOME DE has its own configuration methods, that are preferred over the freedesktop standards. These configurations can be easily accessed and modified through the gsettings utility. There are absolutely no other way to make changes to stuff like antialiasing method or hinting without the gsettings tool.

Solution

The only possible solution to this issue is an additional scriplets, that will handle the configurations for GNOME DE using the gsettings tool.

Current antialiasing method can be queried with command:

gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface font-antialiasing

Grayscale antialiasing method can be set with command:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-antialiasing grayscale

Reverting the changes to the default values is also possible with:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.interface font-antialiasing
maximilionus commented

Decided to make a few tests with KDE spin of Fedora just to make sure that this problem is GNOME-specific. Results: This problem is GNOME-specific. KDE Plasma respects all the fontconfig rules.

maximilionus commented

Started working on this problem and it's, uh... quite troublesome. Not only is the XDG_CURRENT_SESSION environment variable inaccessible on sudo run (without the -E flag), but the gsettings utility for GNOME configuration relies heavily on D-Bus, making it very hard to make any changes under sudo.

The next and main problem is automatic installation through the package manager. Here it becomes simply impossible to make such calls to the user environment.

So the only possible way to implement this would be a special profile.d script, which should check the environment only once after startup and make all the necessary gsettings calls.

maximilionus commented

Found this amazing feature, that allows to override the default GTK apps configuration, also works for GNOME "registry". It can be done by placing the file <NAME>.gschema.override in /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas/:

[org.gnome.desktop.interface]
antialiasing='grayscale'

Note that this is not a fully functional example. In fact, I'm not even sure it works at all.

I am not entirely sure this will work out as intended, but it's definitely a much better way to handle these settings.

Example usage here.