messed up anti-aliasing of fonts in Firefox 3.5
 

Hi!

Installed Firefox 3.5 on my Slackware 12.2 laptop with XFCE4 , in /usr/local/.

I have FireFox 3.0.11 already installed in /usr/bin/. My problem is though 3.0.11 displays the fonts beautifully, anti-aliasing is broken in 3.5 (even the interface fonts are ugly). I don't know whether to put this question in Slackware forum or Firefox forum.

Eagerly awaiting suggestions,

Could you post some screenshots?

Please refer the attachment (Though I doubt whether my problem will be clear in the attachment). The 'w's and 'y's are especially jagged. Please look at the address bar (http://www ....). The letters containing vertical strokes are also badly rendered. It is almost like two verticle strokes. Other applications that are kde based (like kpdf, for example) are also suffering from this problem.
Has it got something to do with Qt?

Firefox in almost all cases uses GTK, so because it happens in more than one application, it may not be FF related. How did you install FF 3.5 ? Did you make any other changes before this happened ?

Downloaded the tar ball from Firefox then unzipped / untarred it to /usr/local. And I don't remember having done any changes I have made to the system except for installing dropline gnome, a fortnight back.

While googling I found these links which might be relevant in the present context -
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...51&postcount=7
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7094387
though these pertain to Ubuntu.

However, 10-hinting-slight.conf is not present in either conf.available or conf.d in /etc/fonts.

I don't know about the Qt apps, and I haven't used Firefox 3.5, but this sounds like a long-standing issue with the binary Firefox distribution.

The Firefox binary is statically linked against its own Cairo libraries. It won't respect your system's font settings. You can solve the problem by building a dynamically linked Firefox from source.

Doesn't Dropline have its own Firefox build? It must provide a SlackBuild. Use it to build 3.5, and your Firefox problems should be solved.

If not, I have an old Firefox 3 SlackbBuild in the Beautiful Fonts thread. You an adapt it for 3.5 (probably just by changing the VERSION) and use it to build a dynamically linked Firefox.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...01#post3324601

I was thinking the same thing. It's strange though that he said his previous version wasn't doing it cause I assume it was also statically linked to its own cairo binary.

I assume his previous version was a Dropline package, not a Slackware package. Dropline probably built it with --enable-system-cairo.

Yeah that makes sense, he just needs to recompile from source. Just FYI, the slackware64-current firefox slackbuild is a source build, so now we have your build and a official one which is good.

True 3.0.11 is Dropline package. I'll download the source and compile it with the option suggested and revert back to you.