Desktop font grayscale AA?

[Isvara]

I just installed Mint Cinnamon 20 and am playing around with the fonts right now. Unfortunately my monitor doesn't always display text that well and sometimes shows a rather annoying red shadow which is especially noticeable on the text under my desktop shortcut icons.

In Windows 10 I can fix this problem with a util called "bettercleartypetuner" and setting it to use grayscale anti aliasing instead of RGB on the fonts but that doesn't seem to be working in Mint so far.

If I set it to use grayscale AA in the font selection it works for the most part but the desktop fonts appear to be unaffected by that setting and still show the red shadow. I was wondering if it might be possible to edit a config file or something and globally force ALL fonts to use grayscale AA instead of only some of them?

[Flemur]

If I set it to use grayscale AA in the font selection it works for the most part but the desktop fonts appear to be unaffected by that setting and still show the red shadow. I was wondering if it might be possible to edit a config file or something and globally force ALL fonts to use grayscale AA instead of only some of them?

I would've thought that the font settings would work everywhere, but there's a standard but optional font-settings file you can create: ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">

<fontconfig>

	<match target="font">
        <edit mode="assign" name="embeddedbitmap"><bool>false</bool></edit>

	<edit mode="assign" name="antialias">  <bool>true</bool></edit>
	<edit mode="assign" name="autohint">   <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="rgba"><const>rgb</const></edit>

	<edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter"><const>lcddefault</const></edit>
	</match>

</fontconfig>

I think you'd change the rgba line to (rgb->none):

Code: Select all

<edit mode="assign" name="rgba"><const>none</const></edit>

Logout/back-in, I guess, to make the changes work. You might want to change the other settings and leave out the name="embeddedbitmap" line.

[Isvara]

Thanks very much but to my surprise all I had to do was logout/in without making any config changes and now the desktop fonts look way better. If I put my face right up to the screen I can still see a very faint red shadow so can't say for sure if it's using the grayscale AA now but at my normal viewing distance it's completely unnoticeable so this is good enough for me!