491626 - Since installing Ubuntu 9.04, all text in Firefox and Thunderbird has ugly shadows

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 458612

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Thomas Wolf]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4) Gecko/20090423 Firefox/3.5b4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b4) Gecko/20090423 Firefox/3.5b4

Ever since I installed Ubuntu 9.04, all text displayed inside Firefox and Thunderbird seems to have a redish one-pixel "shadow" along the left & bottom of many strokes (see where my red arrows are pointing to in the attached image).  This is extremely annoying - reminds me of a badly focused monitor.  At first glance, one might think it's the newer nvidia drivers or X server that came with the new version of Ubuntu - but that' can't be it, since only Firefox and Thunderbird (Shredder beta) seem affected!

Help - my eyes are already killing me after only a week of this.


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Thomas Wolf]

Attachment: Image showing text rendering issues in Firefox and Thunderbird

The red arrows in the picture point to the shadows on all text.  The green arrow show that text not rendered by Firefox/Thunderbird (e.g. the window title area) does not have the shadow problem.

Note that the image is of a Thunderbird window, but the same problem exists with Firefox.

Comment 2

[Sylvain Pasche]

Very likely to be bug 458612.

One way to work around the issue is to create a ~/.fonts.conf that matches the Gnome configuration.

This is a sample ~/.fonts.conf

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <match target="font">
    <edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter">
      <const>lcddefault</const>
    </edit>
    <edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
      <const>rgb</const>
    </edit>
    <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
    <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
      <const>hintfull</const>
    </edit>
    <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

You should adjust the values according to the output of the command:

xrdb -query | grep Xft

Comment 3

[Sylvain Pasche]

Seeing no response from reporter, I'll assume this is bug 458612.

Comment 4

[Thomas Wolf]

@Sylvain,
Sorry for not responding - somehow it slipped my mind.  Yes, the above workaround did the trick for me.