[LightDM] antialiasing with lightdm

[Louis-David Mitterrand]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 09:50:18PM +0100, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
> On mer., 2015-03-25 at 12:34 +0100, tjoen wrote:
> > On 25-03-15 11:16, Louis-David Mitterrand wrote:
> > > On my debian testing system after switching from gdm3 to lightdm I
> > > noticed a quality degradation in xterm font rendering:
> > >
> > > System started with lightdm:
> > >
> > > http://titus.apartia.fr/stuff/lightdm_fonts.png
> > >
> > > System started with gdm3:
> > >
> > > http://titus.apartia.fr/stuff/gdm_fonts.png
> > >
> > > In the second screenshot font are clearer, it's especially visible in
> > > the colored 'ls' output.
> > >
> > > Is there a way to get the same font rendering quality in lightdm?
> > >
> > gdm3 uses wayland and lightdm x.org?
> 
> Completely unrelated.
> 
> Louis-David, my guess is just that GDM enables AA by itself, while your
> LightDM greeter does not, and your desktop environment either.
> 
> lightdm-gtk-greeter on Debian has xft-antialias=true by default, so that
> should be the case, although I don't know if it's propagated to the
> desktop environment.
> 
> In any case, check in your desktop environment if gnome-settings (or
> something like that) is running. My second guess would be that when you
> login from GDM, it doesn't clean after itself.

Actually the solution was really simple, configure fonts through
~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf:

	<?xml version="1.0"?>
	<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
	<!-- /etc/fonts/fonts.conf file to configure system font access -->
	<fontconfig>

		<match target="font">
			<edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
				<bool>true</bool>
			</edit>
			<edit mode="assign" name="embeddedbitmap">
				<bool>false</bool>
			</edit>
			<edit mode="assign" name="hinting">
				<bool>true</bool>
			</edit>
			<edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
				<const>hintslight</const>
			</edit>
			<edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter">
				<const>lcddefault</const>
			</edit>
			<edit mode="assign" name="rgba">
				<const>rgb</const>
			</edit>
		</match>

	</fontconfig>