It seems that my regular GTK apps stopped having subpixel hinting while my Qt apps and Firefox are still fine. Is there a problem with GTK 2.8?
I tried to install Xorg 7.1 from http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...roup_id=177157 shortly after the upgrade to 11.0 but uninstalled it later, leaving some symlinks pointing to nonexistent places. So far I have tried reinstalling Gtk, Pango, Cairo, and Freetype (custom compile with bytecode interpreter enabled), but still no subpixel hinting in pure GTK apps.

Did some more research on this issue. Since GTK 2's font rendering is done by Pango, Cairo, and Fontconfig I reinstalled those packages to make sure they are clean. Experimenting with ~/.font.conf shows that GTK 2 font rendering follows it for AA and hinting, but not subpixel hinting.
Then I compiled freetype 2.1.9 from the slackbuild with bytecode interpreter on, still no subpixel hinting in GTK apps.
Does anyone else have the same problem with GTK apps not using subpixel hinting?
The problem could be caused by Pango no longer directly accessing Freetype internals (as the freetype website says) and thus failing to utilize subpixel hinting. But I can't tell until I determine whether my problem is specific to my system or not.
Help a guy out and tell me whether I have a fsck'd installation please?

(I know this is an ancient thread)

Yes, in a way. GTK+ switched to detecting whether to use subpixel rendering based on what sort of monitor the user has. Based on testing: if it detects a CRT it respects fontconfig settings; if it detects an LCD it forces subpixel rendering settings.

You can still override this with your X resources; I have this in my .Xdefaults (to get nicely antialiased fonts without colours):
I'm betting the other options are "rgb" and "bgr".

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More detail here:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ScreenFontSettings


Thanks lensquest, someone may stumble upon this and find it useful. Sub-pixel rendering has never been successful at doing anything other than making things look worse for me, so it may even be me.