Current: After applying this morning's updates (Wed Feb 27 04:58:17 UTC 2013) the texts in Firefox and Thunderbird look somewhat "corroded" (thinner). I think fontconfig-2.10.2-i486-1.txz is the obvious candidate to blame.
Anyone (other than me ) seeing this?

Yes, i have seen it too when i tried to write something on Echofon

Yes, fonts are looking "weird" everywhere, not just Firefox/Thunderbird.

Based on observation and playing around with the font setting in xfce, it seems that the defaults might have changed and fontconfig is using full or medium hinting by default, making the characters look anorexic.

I have put the following in my ~/.Xresources file
...and that seems to make the gtk based apps look like they used to - and much better to my eyes.

If you're using xfce or another desktop you might have to play with their respective font settings dialogs as they are likely to override the Xresources. I suspect you'll also find a option somewhere in /etc/fonts/conf.d to set the same values, but as I'm an old-school, basic window-manager kind of guy, the Xresources seem to do the job for me.

I noticed the new package is missing a file:

/etc/fonts/conf.avail/20-fix-globaladvance.conf

Copied it over from another machine, things seem slightly better but still not exactly back to how they were before upgrading the package.

Don't want to confuse things more, but I seem to have spotted a deprecation warning of the file /etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf.

I removed it (it's a symlink), renamed also ~/.fonts.conf, rebooted and set Slight font hinting and antialiasing with lxappearance (I could have used for this also the ~/.Xresources file, like GazL hints above, because it's checked in my ~/.xinitrc file for LXDE): this seems to have fixed things here.

I've just one web page where I still see unhinted fonts (scaled), really dunno why http://github.com.

EDIT: added a sample of the effect when opening a new window (the small preview) and part of the webpage.

Attached Thumbnails

   

I've noticed the same. In my case, the fix was to move ~/.fonts.conf to ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf (I think ~/.fonts.conf is/was where anti-aliasing/hinting/etc. should be set, to be DE independent). It also fixes annoying warning emitted by /etc/fonts/conf.d/50-user.conf.

It didn't fix the problem for me. After downgrading fontconfig everything is fine.

For XFCE 4.10 (which is what I use) the font properties are set via Start > Settings > Appearance > Fonts. These properties are kept in ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xsettings.xml.
Changing these rendering settings has no effect on my ~/.fonts.conf file: it keeps saying "hintfull". (Manually) editing the file to read "hintslight" resolved the firefox/thunderbird font change.

Actually my ~/.fonts.conf file has not changed since 2011-05-03. Interesting might be which Feb 27 update (fontconfig, mesa, xorg-server ?) made firefox/thunderbird react differently.

To get rid of the nasty "reading configurations from ~/.fonts.conf is deprecated" messages I created a ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d directory and moved my ~/.fonts.conf file to ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf .

My fonts changed too and I'm unable to get them as they were before. Tried all the tricks in the thread.

I don't know about anybody else, but in my $HOME directory I'm also getting a "fontconfig" directory which has a bunch of cache's since the fontconfig upgrade.

I have that directory too, but the last modification date is from Feb 16, the same as the most recent file in there, so it seems unrelated to the fontconfig upgrade.

Same effect here. I can fix that by removing the link to 70-yes-bitmaps.conf and adding the one to 70-no-bitmaps.conf in /etc/fonts/conf.d.

For mine it's Feb. 27th and I know for a fact I never had it before.

As far as I know, the Slackware fontconfig package has never linked either of those files in /etc/font/conf.d. I've been applying a patch to fonts.conf to keep fontconfig from using the 100dpi and 75dpi directories by default, but it wouldn't help if bitmapped fonts were in any of the other directories. Perhaps it would be better (and more flexible) to drop the patch and include a link to 70-no-bitmaps.conf?

I also had a report that the new fontconfig was trying to use the Helvetica font (Liberation fonts claims this one), and that could possibly be causing some of the font changes. Maybe this as 70-no-helvetica.conf could help:

BTW, I've always thought that the default font choices in most browsers are somewhat subpar and have long set my own local font preferences. This might be why I didn't see much of a difference when I upgraded fontconfig here.

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