GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 622190
Keyboard indicator doesn't honor font antialiasing settings
Last modified: 2010-10-19 18:19:45 UTC
Even if antialiasing is turned off, either via gnome-appearance-properties or via /etc/fonts/*, GNOME 2.30 keyboard indicator in notification area does render antialiased text. Mysteriously, this happens only for particular layouts. In my case (see attachment), the "США" text (meaning "US" in Russian) is antialiased, while "Рус" ("Rus") is not. I've noticed that almost all three-letter abbreviations are rendered correctly, without antialiasing (except that "США" one), while four-letter ones are antialiased unconditionally. Seems like antialiasing here is the result of horizontal scaling when the resulting text doesn't fit some certain pixel width. I'm using Mandriva 2010.1 (Cooker), ru_RU locale, Tahoma font.
Created attachment 164139 [details] two notification area screenshots
I suspect the issue with cairo rendering. In libgnomekbd, check the file libgnomekbd/gkbd-status.c. On line 357, there is #ifdef 0. Change it to #ifdef 1 and rebuild libgnomekbd. After you restart g-s-d, you will get the files label0.png and label1.png. Please attach them here. I suspect the defects are visible in those files. If so, it is between libgnomekbd and cairo. What you also can try is cairo_font_options_set_antialias (fo, CAIRO_ANTIALIAS_NONE); on line 211 (before pango_cairo_set_font_options). Check if will change the behavior.
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug if you can provide the information asked for. Thanks!