Yes! I finally managed to solve my font problems with Mandriva and Qt 4.2. What was happening was that font antialiasing was not working for any of the Qt4.2 applications. What was funny was that for Qt4.1.4 everything was (and still is) working fine.
I was trying to find a solution since the very beginning of Qt4.2 public snapshots. At first I thought that this was caused by the fact that Qt4.2 was still unstable but when 4.2.0 came out and the problem persisted, I became worried. I even talked to Trolltech support during DevDays in Munich about the issue, but without any result.
Today I finally managed to get my fonts antialiased in Mandriva. The problem is caused by a configuration file from Mandriva’s fontconfig package, which disables antialiasing for some fonts. I don’t know why, but although it shouldn’t, Qt4.2 triggers one of the sections in the file that disables antialiasing. What is strange is that changing font faces in qtconfig doesn’t solve anything – the section is still triggered,
so the problem might be within Qt or fontconfig.
The workaround is to remove the file (or comment out the section) – it is situated in /etc/fonts/conf.d/ and is called 02-mdk-disable-antialias.conf.
I just sent a bug report to Trolltech about it, let’s see if they can do anything about it.
Finally I can start playing around with a fully working Qt4.2 installation…
Hi,
Any progress on this? I have Ubuntu Hardy with Qt 4.3 (I think) and have the same problem – but no such file. What are its contents?
Hi Felix,
We’ve been unable to pinpoint the problem (despite looking for it for quite some time together with TT support team – thanks Stian!) and it seems that newer Mandriva releases (or newer Qt releases) don’t suffer from it anymore, so the subject was dropped down.
The file in question contains some directives for fontconfig to remove antialiasing from few rare fonts and unfortunately it seemed to have touched other fonts as well, but if the problem was with FontConfig, Mandriva or Qt (or any subset of these) I am not able to tell.
If you feel like experimenting, start disabling fontconfig files that disable antialiasing in certain conditions and see if removal of any of these cause your installation to start working properly. Then reactivate those files and send a bug report to Trolltech notifying about the issue (you can send a link to this blog entry as well to notify these problems could be related).
Hello,
I’m having a problem with Qt4 and fonts as well and no one seems to know what’s causing it. The fonts are totally unreadable and basically a series of overlapping fractions (all numbers). I’ve looked for the above file you wrote about but also don’t have it on my system. Would you have any idea as to what the problem could be?