Agree with Arthur, I just spent half an hour trying to find what is overriding my lcdfilter fontconfig settings. I personally need 'lcdlegacy' filter for the fonts I use but haven't found a way to actually use it with current state of things.

This is something we need to sort out before 3.0 and preferably get 2.32 fixed as well once we agree on a solution. Since 2.32 development is dead, I suggest reverting the commit there. For 3.0, I understand this is an advanced option that should not be exposed to user by default, perhaps a GSettings option would do the trick?

My bad, this is only on master, it's just gentoo who patches 2.32.1 sources.

Tomas, you discussed this with Caolan. Can you post the results of your discussion here?

Okay, things are little different. To reproduce, do the following steps:

First, you need to enable FT_CONFIG_OPTION_SUBPIXEL_RENDERING define in freetype sources to actually see the difference and recompile. For Gentoo, just put '-bindist' in your USE flags. For Fedora, pass '--with subpixel_rendering' on rpmbuild command-line or edit the spec file. I'm testing with bytecode intepreter enabled (Fedora since freetype-2.4.4-3.fc16, Gentoo with USE="-auto-hinter").

Then you need to set fontconfig:
 1. enable sub-pixel rendering in fontconfig, usually /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-sub-pixel-bgr.conf
 2. set 'lcdfilter' option to 'lcddefault'
 3. set 'hinting' option to 'true' (for TrueType or for everything)
 4. set 'hintstyle' option to  'hintfull'

This could be also done via gnome 2.x control-center or by putting the following contents in /etc/fonts/local.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="hinting">
      <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
    <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle">
      <const>hintfull</const>
    </edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

Also make sure that your gnome-settings-daemon is patched with 6cf315249ab27 (the original concern here).

Now there are two things that bothers me:
 1. On my Fedora rawhide machine, with gnome-settings-daemon-2.91.9-6.fc16, editing the 'lcdfilter' option in /etc/fonts/local.conf makes immediate effect as long it's picked by gnome-settings-daemon's fontconfig-monitor (xsettings plugin).
    However, back at home on Gentoo, I was unable to override settings just by editing /etc/fonts/local.conf. Could that be since I'm running 2.32 g-s-d  with the above patch? Weird.

 2. LibreOffice still doesn't respect the settings, makes no use of 'lcdfilter' option and probably falls back to 'legacy' or 'none' settings. Clearly the original idea of the patch fails.

I talked to Caolan and we agreed that g-s-d shouldn't hardcode this setting. Either make it configurable the same way like hinting or do nothing. As the patch was meant specifically for OpenOffice and makes no difference actually, I would suggest reverting it.

This is more an OpenOffice/LibreOffice issue, I'll open separate bugreport to get the issue fixed on proper place. Please see the attachment for illustration - notice the yellow haze around letters and no haze in OOo.

Created attachment 181721 [details]
Screenshot of LibreOffice

Created attachment 181722 [details]
Screenshot of gedit

Thanks for the explanations.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 631924 ***