As far as I can tell, the font rendering issues are common regardless of whether you use stock freetype2 or the patched one: Qt5 apps just stand out which makes me think that the toolkit must be much too different internally from its predecessor. "Qt5 is, well, a bit of a mystery to me, too. Infinality Ultimate's author bohoomil had this to say on the subject (): I already have to work around this “feature” to treat semi-bold fonts as regular bold in Qt on OS X (Qt4 and Qt5 are handicapped alike there in this aspect), I REALLY hope that Qt5 on Linux won’t follow suit …! Part of that is due to Qt5 not respecting my choice of fonts (picking an unknown other font) but it also seems there’s no distinction being made between medium (semi-bold) and bold, making everything look either too heavy or too light. That’s Qt 5.2.1 to be exact.įont rendering is better here, but it’s still a far cry from being as nice as under Qt4.
SEGOE UI FONT UNITY SOFTWARE
Thinking it might be due to running beta-quality software in a “subsession” rather than a standalone session, I thought I’d had a look at “pure” Qt5 from the official (K)Ubuntu repos.
įont rendering is horrible when starting KF5 applications from under a KDE4 session: blocky and something is clearly off with RGB antialiasing. Recently I have been playing a bit with “Project Neon5”, (K)Ubuntu’s KDE Frameworks 5 playground, to get a preview of what’s supposed to become the next KDE desktop.
It does wonders to my KDE4-based desktop, giving text a quality that’s just about as good as with MS Window’s ClearType (using Segoe UI semi-bold as my desktop font) and better than OS X’s font rendering. I’m a bit of a font freak, so I have “bohoomil”‘s Ultimate version of the Infinality patches to libfreetype6 and fontconfig installed. I posted this on the Qt forums earlier, but it was suggested to repost here: