[SOLVED, with thanks] Antialiasing has gone

[timbow]

This is mint 19 Cinnamon on an Acer C720 chromebook. Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller.

I had a bit of graphic design work to do and the unused fonts were making it hard so I was trying to remove all the international fonts. First with something I pasted into the terminal having found it here. Didn't seem to do anything so I installed the gnome font manager from the software manager and was manually unchecking them which I think is just a 'disable' function but who knows - there's no help file. At some point I lost antialiasing on the desktop, in a browser, any program window, everywhere. I can turn it off and on and it makes no difference. I uninstalled the font manager, rebooted several times, nothing obvious seems to work. Is there some way of restoring antialiasing? I did crash libre office at one point by disabling a font which was in use.

[edit] I said everywhere but in fact the only place where text still looks right is on the login screen at start up

[timbow]

If I create another Administrator user account I get my text display back correctly. So I am thinking can I move over my Home folder with all my documents and somehow not have to reinstall all the software and move Thunderbird and all my emaill ....
...no it isn't a great idea, and what the heck are all those 'groups'? I don't want to mess with things like that.

How do I reinstate font display? Or reset my user account to defaults or something like that?

[Flemur]

If I create another Administrator user account I get my text display back correctly. So I am thinking can I move over my Home folder with all my documents and somehow not have to reinstall all the software and move Thunderbird and all my emaill ....

Anti-aliasing and other font configs are defined by a bunch files all over the place; it's a mess.

Since your new user shows fonts correctly, try deleting these from your $HOME, or copying them to your $HOME from the new user you made.

Code: Select all

~/.fonts.conf
~/.config/font* 
(about 5 files ^^^ )
./.cache/fontconfig
~/.local/share/font-manager
~/.fonts

[timbow]

Thanks, pal. I see what you mean about the configs being everywhere. I don't even have all those locations you listed, and I had several others not listed, maybe created by the font-manager app. Anyway I recklessly deleted a few files that looked like candidates and we are working again. Boy, it hurt my eyes to read that pixelated text!