Fixing QT fonts in Ubuntu 9.10 Keramic

A few days ago I decided to bite the bullet and update Ubuntu. The last time I did this it caused me quite a lot of frustration – but amazingly this time it was almost painless. The wireless stopped working but I managed to get it back in about 30 minutes. The other thing was Qt fonts (the fonts in skype or qbittorrent). After a bit of searching and a few false attempts I managed to fix it.

The fix¹ is quite simple, actually – just paste the following code in ~/.fonts.conf. This settings seem to work, unlike the many I tried before that.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font">
  <edit name="rgba" mode="assign">
    <const>rgb</const>
  </edit>
  <edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
  <edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign">
   <const>hintfull</const>
  </edit>
   <edit name="hinting" mode="assign">
    <bool>true</bool>
   </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

The forts are anti-aliased, as expected, and look fine in FF, Gnome and Qt-based applications.

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¹ http://swiss.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1316216