Poor Font Rendering, after upgrade to Tinycore version

[gwalther]

Fonts are rendered very poorly on my systems after upgrading from version 3.6 to 3.8.4 (1280x1024 LCD, xorg,JWM).  The symptoms are the straight parts of letters are thinnner then the curved parts...ie blobby.
 It started after  libfreetype was changed to libfteetype.so.6.6.2.  I suspect some default config setting has changed, but I can not figure out how or what to change to make the fonts look good again.  I tried using .font.conf...with antialias false...per another thread..still not good

So , I replaced libfreetype.so.6.6.2 with libfreetype.so.6.4.0, redid the syslinks, and now my fonts are back looking good.

Can someone suggest how I can learn what is it with my systems that causes this behavior?

[curaga]

The Luxi fonts indeed look bad with hinting. If you haven't installed any fonts, those are used by default. (they are the smallest)

You could either install some of the fonts available (dejavu, liberation, bitstream, MS fonts), or disable hinting for Luxi fonts with:

https://launchpadlibrarian.net/23572979/25-luxi-no-hinting.conf

[gwalther]

Thanks curaga...
I managed to download the file from your link, change the ownership to ..root...root and copied it to /etc/fonts/conf.d/...
and now my fonts look better but still not as good as in tc ver3.6...so i added /etc/fonts/conf.d/25-luxi-no-hinting.conf to my backup...
don't expect this is the best way to do it, but it works for me.

I suspect others might have the same issue with libfreetype 6.6.2, and would suggest that the Tinycore team consider  disabling  hinting for Luxi fonts as part of the base  for versions using libfreetype 6.6.2.

[roberts]

Disable hinting for Luxi fonts added to 4.x base. Look for it in the next cut.

[Rich]

Hi gwalther
I just updated from 3.4 to 3.84. When I started geany I couldn't believe how bad the fonts looked.
I copied the 6.4 version and adjusted the links like you said and it looks great again. Thanks for
making this an easy fix.