GTK4 text rendering makes antialiasing mandatory
There's a ticket (now closed) which mentions the problem but unfortunately, it fails to convey the impact. The problem is not that the "fonts are blurry". The problem is that GTK developers essentially mandate that the users should always have the antialiasing setting "on" lest text rendering completely breaks.
I first came across this issue when I started following the gtkmm
tutorial using the version 4 of the library. As we quickly discovered in another ticket, the problem had nothing to do with the C++ wrapper and had everything to do with the upstream GTK project.
Now, I've been using GTK-based applications for more than a decade and all apps coming with MATE 1.26 still look fine on my machine. They look fine because none of them use version 4 yet. If they did, the outrage would be much more prominent, as the question of whether to enable antialiasing or not is not just a matter of taste, but also a matter of accessibility and health.
Contrary to popular belief, there are many fonts that look fine with AA disabled, for example, the entire Ubuntu family and Bitstream Vera fonts. Here's the gtk3-demo
rendered without AA and still looking great:
To reproduce, it is enough to switch off the AA in the fontconfig file located at ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf
:
<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
<match target="font" >
<edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
Needless to say, other GUI toolkits still respect system-wide AA settings and look just as good as GTK used to look 20 years ago.
I would like to clarify the official position of the Gnome project on antialiasing. Is it mandatory for GTK4?