latest unstable and Xft font rendering

[Nick Monkman <nick_m@crosswinds.net>]

Hi all,

I am using the latest gnome bins from sid and am quite happy with it.
However, one thing is confusing to me. I recently decided to try the
mozilla-snapshot package. The font rendering was antialiased, which was
okay, but looked terrible on pages with light text on a dark background.
As I understand it, the newer versions of mozilla use Xft for font
rendering, so I decided to try to disable it. 

First of all, changing anything in unix.js had no effect. I discovered
eventually that this is because (I think) mozilla doesn't so any of it's
own antialiasing anymore - it uses gtk / xft somehow (and I am not clear
how). So I decided to try changing settings in my /etc/X11/XftConfig
file, using everything from match statements like:

match
	any size < 15
	any size > 8
edit
	antialias = false;

to completely deleting (renaming) this file. This had no effect. My
gnome fonts were still antialiased, both on gnome widgets (looks okay)
to mozilla-snapshot (looks terrible on aforementioned pages). Finally I
just set GDK_USE_XFT=0. This disables, as you probably know, all Gnome2
Xft rendering, as far as I can tell. This is okay, but I'd like know why
editing my XftConfig file had no effect, as I would like to use
selective antialiasing as provided by the match statements. Any ideas?

Thanks,
Nick