How to minimize the use of anti-aliased fonts across all my desktop environment and applications?

Question

I have configured some applications (Emacs, xfce4-term) to use bitmapped fonts, and disabled hinting/anti-aliasing.

But there are still a lot of anti-aliased fonts in my GUI desktop (xfce4).

If I simply turn off anti-aliasing through settings, I see a lot of ugly-looking fonts. Much of this text, however, could be rendered just as well using bitmapped fonts, for which anti-aliasing is not necessary. (For example, the font used for Google results, or for any generic dialog, menu, etc.)

Therefore, instead of turning off all anti-aliasing, I would prefer to configure all these "default" faces to use bitmapped fonts.

I'm looking for global settings that would achieve this goal without having to individually customize every application.

FWIW, my distro is Debian, and my desktop environment is xfce4.

Answer 1

Put this in your ~.fonts.conf, and set Arial in your XFCE control panel.


<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM 'fonts.dtd'>
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font">
  <test name="family" qual="any">
   <string>Arial</string>
  </test>
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>false</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <test name="family" qual="any">
   <string>Helvetica</string>
  </test>
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>false</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <test name="family" qual="any">
   <string>Helvetica Neue</string>
  </test>
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>false</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <test name="family" qual="any">
   <string>Courier</string>
  </test>
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>false</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <test name="family" qual="any">
   <string>Courier New</string>
  </test>
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>false</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <test name="family" qual="any">
   <string>Tahoma</string>
  </test>
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>false</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>



 <match target="font">
  <test compare="more" name="weight">
   <const>medium</const>
  </test>
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>



 <match target="font">
  <test compare="more_eq" name="size" qual="any">
   <double>14</double>
  </test>
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <!-- Firefox -->
 <match target="font">
  <test compare="more_eq" name="pixelsize" qual="any">
   <double>15</double>
  </test>
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="pattern">
  <test name="family" qual="any">
   <string>Helvetica</string>
  </test>
  <edit binding="same" mode="assign" name="family">
   <string>Arial</string>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font">
  <test compare="eq" name="family" qual="any">
   <string>Skype UI Symbol</string>
  </test>
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias">
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>

</fontconfig>