Is there a way I can see what settings fontconfig is currently using?
I'm trying to figure out why fonts look better in an XFCE session as opposed to when I start a bare X session (no window manager, no Xsettings daemon, just a terminal).
$ fc-match --verbose Sans
# shortened output from my system:
Pattern has 36 elts (size 48)
family: "DejaVu Sans"(s)
hintstyle: 3(i)(s)
hinting: True(s)
verticallayout: False(s)
autohint: False(s)
scalable: True(w)
dpi: 75(f)(s)
rgba: 1(i)(w)
scale: 1(f)(s)
fontformat: "TrueType"(w)
lcdfilter: 1(i)(w)
Look at http://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html (1) to figure out what the numers means. (search for <const>)
Take rgba: 1(i)(w)
for example.
From (1)
rgb rgba 1
we see that the subpixel format used is rgb. I assume the stuff in parenthesis is some kind of type info.
I think the fontconfig format is expressive enough to use different configuration for different fonts so it makes sense that one have to give a font.
Now.. a different question is if all applications actually respects these settings. Gnome for instance seems to do its own thing... (?)
It might also be helpful to run the application in interest with the FC_DEBUG environment variable set (http://www.freedesktop.org/software/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html#DEBUG)
FC_DEBUG=1 chromium
/etc/fonts/fonts.conf
?/etc/fonts/conf.d/
but they are system wide, so they are not depend on the window manager. To change settingsdpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config