Another think to check is your dpi, changing that made my fonts look even better. I usually use 96. You can check your with xdpyinfo | grep dots.

You might try installing webcore-fonts and see if it helps with particular webpages.

Sorry for late reply - limited internet access at the moment!

@ bindestreck
yes I always use 96 dpi, slight hinting and RGB.

@ tomtom
Yes webcore-fonts certainly did improve webpages. I think Liberation Sans 8 is the best font for UI elements (menu, button, status bar, and so on), at least to my eyes, but I just can't seem to hit upon the right formula for LibreOffice, Gimp and Firefox. Perhaps Firefox and LibreOffice have their own internal font rendering mechanism just to throw a spanner in the works?

I'm more or less resigned to the difference now; wasted too much time on this already and after a few hours it's hard to tell any more because your eyes are so weary trying out all the changes. At least QtCurve narrows the gap between KDE and GTK-2 in every other area; just a shame "The Devs Who Know Better Than Everyone Else" decided to throw yet another spanner in the works with their GTK-3 abomination, which promises to widen the gap again, and by all accounts has made it difficult for every other dev out there trying to keep up. (Who on earth are they working for anyhow?)

Thanks all.

Not like QT is any better with QT5 than GTK land is with GTK3.

That's true. I really need to get my fvwm config finished and sod the rest!

If by "too much time" you mean "five years and counting", your experience is similar to mine
Your thread forced me to review my font settings and now I'm pretty scared that some day it might stop working because it's such a non-repeatable mess that just happens to look ok. That's the reason I can give you some isolated hints in no specific order, but with no guarantee of positive result.

You might install Droid font;
you might comment out font settings in .Xresources;
you might recompile freetype with subpixel rendering enabled, but now I recall that sometime this year there was an update of freetype in current and it didn't screw up my fonts for a change;
Finally you might post the content of your /etc/fonts/conf.d directory and your /etc/fonts/local.conf.

In the end, someone might finally write comprehensive font guide for slackdocs

gezley,

why don't you try putting fonts hinting to 'full'? When I tweaked KDE and GTK settings, fonts looked like this:

https://slackalaxy.files.wordpress.c...snapshot51.png

Comparing QT4 and GTK2/3 applications, their fonts appeared consistent enough to me.

That would be great! I now find that certain web pages in Firefox have boxes where fonts should be! Great! Now what!?

Here's what I have done so far:

1) linked (ln -s) 10-autohint.conf and 10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf from /etc/fonts/conf.avail/ to /etc/fonts/conf.d/ but removed those links as advised by dugan;

2) removed 60-liberation.conf from /etc/fonts/conf.d/ (necessary for next step); otherwise the contents of this directory are as they were with a full install of -current;

3) added the following to /etc/fonts/local.conf, as per slackbuilds instructions for webcore-fonts:
;
4) installed webcore-fonts from slackbuilds;
5) took the "Microsoft Solution" - 3 Hail Marys and rebooted.

Now I'm stuck with fonts looking magnificent in KDE and KDE apps; inferior but just about acceptable in GTK apps; and completely absent in certain web pages, where they are replaced by boxes.

I really don't want to fight these battles with my computer in 2015; once upon a time I was happy to do so but now I have so many other battles to fight. Is it completely beyond Red Hat, Suse, Google, Canonical and all the other self-appointed hijackers of Linux to knock their heads together and come up with an integrated desktop that satisfies all users - a desktop that can be as full-featured as KDE or as bare (and useless) as Unity and Gnome 3? But that would be too mundane for them; they'd far rather create stupid new problems than chip away at and finally solve these old, infuriating issues still plaguing us in 2015.

Full and medium hinting makes fonts dreadful Petar. (Nice desktop by the way. What theme do you use for your panel?)

I wouldn't be too apprehensive about the future. Things have certainly improved an awful lot since I started using Debian and SuSE around the turn of the century. What really annoys me though is the way, over the past few years, the "Big Players", the self-appointed corporate hijackers of Linux, the self-appointed guardians of the direction it's heading in, continually choose to create new problems rather than solve these old, boring, mundane problems. They'd far rather cripple their "enterprise products" with some stupid beta-quality hack put together by their very own junior programmers as long as the buzzwords and media circus around this newfangled and over-engineered hack keep them on the front pages. And, worse, they adopt the old strategy of divide and conquer, so that the best developers end up opting out completely, tired of fighting battles these corporate bullies with their huge teams of junior programmers are going to win anyway.

well, that's what I am used to...

I do not remember anymore, since I gave up on KDE soon after I took that screenshot. It was some theme that comes with KDE by default.

My opinion too. But objectively...

Slight hinting looks like OS X
Full hinting looks like Windows
Medium hinting is its own thing

It depends on how do you feel about those boxes; if you perceive them sharp and cute, leave them be and translate on the fly. Further changes might give you the same boxes instead of letters, but distorted and out of focus

Seriously: you installed webcore fonts, so probably you now have 35-webcore-fonts in /etc/fonts/conf.d and that file tells your Firefox to use fonts such as Times New Roman and Arial, which you probably don't have but every Windows has, so just copy them and report back. Should be fine, I suppose.

Wrong on all counts! ls -R /etc/fonts/ | grep webcore returns nothing; and both Times and Arial, along with other MS fonts, do indeed exist in /usr/share/fonts, presumably placed there by the webcore Slackbuild because I didn't put them there.

The slightly inferior font rendering in GTK apps under KDE I can live with, but the missing fonts problem in Firefox (see attached) is turning out to be a real pain. I have a full install of 64-bit current, with very few modifications, all of them from Slackbuilds.

Here you are, 35-webcore-fonts.conf:
How did you install webcore-fonts, from sbopkg?