Subpixel/Lcd mode with VRGB/VBGR makes qt4 applications on Jaunty unreadable

Same thing on update of Jaunty (Kubuntu). Ok for several weeks until today. Not sure if today's apt-get upgrade did it or install of gtk-gnutella did it. Removal of gtk-gnutella and reboot did not help. Only on KDE apps. Non KDE apps are ok (firefox, tbird, oOO etc.) Was also adjusting the anti-alias settings in KDE today but put them back to default (system setting) before I noticed this (now KDE setting page has these bad "fonts" so can't check).

Moving to package qt4-x11 and confirming as having the same problems with an up to date Jaunty.

Neither removing .kde nor .qt did solve the problem for me. Also changed the nvidia driver on my system back to 173 and switched of Compiz without any change in the qt app behaviour.

Changing the rendering of the fonts solves the problem. The bug appears when you select Suavizado Subpixel (LCD) [spanish].

Hi duendetuc, I cannot yet confirm your workaround yet. Do you mean the Gnome "Appearance" menu? Changing the font rendering has no effect at all for me for qt4 applications.

2009/3/3 Caspar Clemens Mierau <email address hidden>:
> Hi duendetuc, I cannot yet confirm your workaround yet. Do you mean the
> Gnome "Appearance" menu? Changing the font rendering has no effect at
> all for me for qt4 applications.
for qt4 applicaiton, you need set it with qtconfig

The problem is, that qtconfig is a qt-application and therefore wasn't usable, too. Writing "wasn't" as for me the updates from today seemed to solve this issue. Can anybody confirm this please?

Well, changing rendering of the fonts works for me. But i get bad fonts than with LCD mode.

Tks.

Close your qt4 apps, go to System>Preferences>Appearance, at fonts select better shapes and close, open any qt4 app. That works for me.

Thanks for your comments. Now I can cleary reproduce and work around this - still existing - bug.

For reproduction:

- close all qt4 apps
- change font display to lcd mode in System>Preferences>Appearance>Fonts

As a work around

- select "better shapes" in System>Preferences>Appearance>Fonts

This began happening to me after an update yesterday. Fonts unreadable in qt4 apps, gtk apps fine. As I am using Kubuntu 9.04a6 64bit I had to fiddle around with the unreadable settings manager to turn off subpixel rendering, but that fixed it. Unfortunately now my fonts look awful. Hopefully this is the correct place to post.

Confirmed here too. I've been seeing this with VLC since the start of the Jaunty development cycle but as I rarely use it didn't bother about it. I then found that Skype suffered the same problem. I tried using qtconfig-qt4 and it suffered the same.

Originally I thought this was a font-file or font-cache corruption issue but can confirm that disabling the sub-pixel font rendering does work-around the issue although makes every other window's fonts look very grainy.

Raising the importance and setting a milestone.

I have this problem not with all subpixel-renderings. Only VRBG and VBGR are broken, with RBG and BGR are ok.

FYI, still a problem in Jaunty Beta.

First, I want to apologize for commenting on the duplicate bug #346320.
Second, I would also like to confirm this is still a bug in Jaunty Beta.

My font settings:

Res.: 86dpi
Smoothing: subpixel
Hinting: full
Subpixel Order: VBGR

Setting Subpixel order to RGB or BGR makes fonts readable.

Assigning to jriddle as he seems to be mostly involved in this source package and the bug is still untouched with an increasing number of duplicates.

I can also confirm this bug, and the workaround does work for me. Updated Jaunty as of last night. This affects VirtualBoxOSE, Skype for me.. Completely unusable as you can't read anything.

I only had kde installed (kubuntu) and saw this problem several months ago. After deleting ~/.kde it fixed it but lost all my settings of course. I think the problem for kubuntu is if you play with the font settings "anti-alias" and dpi in the kde setup screen you cause the problem on all kde 4.2 apps (not on k3b which uses a 3.5 compat. lib I think). The work arounds described here seem to all be for people running gnome with a few qt apps showing this problem and are fixed in gnome. So I installed gnome and tried the work arounds but they didn't affect anything when running kde. Now qt apps like dolphin are OK in gnome (maybe always were for me?) but still see bad fonts in KDE.

By the way, I had returned the anti-alias and dpi settings in KDE to their original setting (disabled/system settings) and the fonts are still unreadable in KDE 4.2 apps (but OK when run in gnome).

Removing ~/.kde works for me too.

As i said in duplicate bug #334657, a "sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig" solved the problem without the need of deleting ~/.kde, and for all users.

Strange... :
Today i tested VRBG subpixel rendering, and the problem happenned immediately on fresh started qt4 apps. But a dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig didn't worked this time, i had to change back to RGB.

Before the upgrade to jaunty, subpixel rendering was set to RGB.

After apt-get upgrade last night problem went away in KDE. As a test, in KDE settings, set anti-alias on then off. The problem returned. Today after another upgrade KDE still has bad fonts. Tried "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -fontconfig" and did not help.Still bad in KDE and qt apps also now bad in Gnome (e.g., dolphin). In gnome, moved from VRBG to RGB fixed dolphin in gnome. Had no effect in KDE after closing gnome and starting kde. Tried deleting ~/.fontconfig and ~/.fonts to no avail in KDE. Tried selectively deleting a few things in ~/.kde to no avail. Think now will need to rm -rf ~/.kde again to fix unless someone knows what to delete in ~/.kde.

This fixes it for me w/o deleting ~/.kde: Run gnome and find the kde "system settings" in a menu. If I set the anti-alias to "system setting" or either "vertical" setting for hinting it makes kde apps (e.g., dolphin) fonts bad. If I set anti-alias to disabled or to BGR or RGB (not vertical) it looks ok. (But when disabled, fonts are jagged. ) Then I log out of Gnome and start kde, fonts in kde apps remain OK.

I could not fix this easily in KDE because the fonts were bad in the "system setting" screen and were unreadable so unable to make the settings. In Gnome you can always use Gnomes's font setting to repair the bad fonts in kde/qt apps so they are visible in KDE "system settings" where they must be fixed since the Gnome font settings don't carry over to when you run KDE.

Hopefully the cause of this will be found and fixed before the jaunty (k)ubuntu release.

I can confirm that using a "not vertical" setting (RGB or BGR) from the KDE settings menu also gives me readable, nice looking fonts. Using either "vertical" option gives unreadable fonts.

I can confirm gds' workaround with the option "system settings" for the hinting in "system settings".

Still, this bug is not fixed in Jaunty RC and may give a desastrous first impression to new users and upgraders.

On 18 апреля 2009 21:07:16 Erdal Ronahi wrote:
> I can confirm gds' workaround with the option "system settings" for the
> hinting in "system settings".
>
> Still, this bug is not fixed in Jaunty RC and may give a desastrous
> first impression to new users and upgraders.
This solution works for me too.
By the way I couldn't understand the presence V variant of subpixel order
(GNOME term). I tried all possible variants (GNOME) and see only slight
difference between them (IMHO this is too subjective).

FYI: V-variants are for 90 degree rotated displays. They are said to improve display experience.

I must step back from my former statement. The workaround does work only sometimes, and I have not yet found out under which conditions. But I obviously cannot use all the hinting options.

I have always had Subpixel ordering set to "RGB", in conjunction with full subpixel LCD smoothing. I have very consistently seen the bug occur in QT based applications. It happens seemingly randomly, however: the fonts will be fine one minute, then scrambled the next. I always run a Gnome desktop.

I am somewhat disappointed that this is not a release critical bug, as I just switched to Ubuntu from Arch for stability reasons, and that's the first thing I see on my rotated screens.

Fix is here and could have been found easily before release:
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/qt/devel/qt-x11-opensource-src-4.5.0-disable_ft_lcdfilter.patch?revision=1.1&view=markup

Rebuild package with the fix from above:
http://clemens.endorphin.org/libqtgui4_4.5.0-0ubuntu4_i386.deb
Not realizing, that I might want to share this, the apt-build profile was for core2. Use on your own risk.

Thanks for finding the patch. I have packages cooking in my PPA: https://edge.launchpad.net/~echidnaman/+archive/ppa

I'll try to get this patch included in a post-release update as soon as possible.

Hi all.
Qt 4.5.1 library is released.

Changes 4.5.1:
...
- Font rendering
   * Improved performance of subpixel antialiased text rendering by using a
     mask in the calls to XRender's text compositing function.
   * [248387] Properly respect the font config LCD filter settings for
     subpixel antialiased text rendering when Freetype's native subpixel
     rendering is disabled.
   * [248498] Fix garbled rendering of subpixel antialiased text when using
     Freetype's native subpixel rendering for vertical subpixel layouts.
   * [248644] Fall back to Qt's subpixel rendering if Freetype's subpixel
     rendering was available at compile-time but not at run-time.
...

May be this release will fix a bug?
The only disappoints me this bug was not resolved in Ubuntu 9.04 before its release.
I think it will take a time before Ubuntu will have qt 4.5.1 in repositories to test it.

---
cheers, Vladimir

Just to chime in, I got this on a fresh update to Jaunty on an old testing system (before upgrading production systems). I thought my locale had been set to Hittite or something like that ;)

Tried the following:
1. Alter nvidia driver (96 - it's an old system) to nv (no change)
2. Remove extra nvidia parts of nvidia xorg.conf settings (no change)
3. Removed plasma* in .kde/share/config (no change)
4. Moved aside .kde, restart kde (no change)
5. Used another notebook to help me navigate to the font settings, turn off antialiasing at a wild guess - fonts come back but ugly of course
6. Changed VBGR to BGR or RGB in sub pixel hinting, restart X (hint: set dontzap option to false in ServerFlags of Xorg.conf), login, fonts are back.

Attached a photo just to illustrate the problem for completeness.

I'd agree it's not a good ad for Kubuntu but I think it would only happen on upgrade and if VBGR/VRGB was selected in the previous setting.

We can't upgrade to Qt 4.5.1 right away until the issue highlighted here: http://rdieter.livejournal.com/13559.html is resolved.

But, in the meantime, I have a patched version of Qt in my PPA. (https://edge.launchpad.net/~echidnaman/+archive/ppa) Could those affected by the bug please test to see if the issue is fixed with these packages?

Oh, you will probably have to restart after installing the updates.

Confirmed, your patched version of qt4-x11 fixes the issue. Thanks.

Oh, and by the way, no restart required (!).

Ok, thanks. Attached are source packages that I will try to get in the jaunty-updates repository.

Approved, please upload.

Accepted qt4-x11 into jaunty-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

A fix has been released to Karmic. (In the form of Qt 4.5.1)

The fix has been built now for Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty); so those affected by this bug please test by enabling proposed updates as described in the previous post.

I did what ihttps://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed said but don't see a "qt4-x11" package in aptitude (curses gui).

Also the search,
sudo aptitude -t jaunty-proposed search ".*qt4.*"
yields no qt4-x11 or anything similar. What package name should I find for this fix?

(Never used "aptitude" before.)

qt4-x11 is the source package which all the Qt packages are built from. You'd want libqt4-gui, and all of its depends to be upgraded.

Thanks! Installed it and it works. Before I installed, I tried the "vertical" anti-alias selections and it showed bad font. After the install it did not.

This bug was fixed in the package qt4-x11 - 4.5.0-0ubuntu4.1

---------------
qt4-x11 (4.5.0-0ubuntu4.1) jaunty-proposed; urgency=low

  * Add kubuntu_10_disable_ft_lcdfilter.diff from suse to fix font corruption
    on vertically-hinted LCD screens (LP: #334657)

 -- Jonathan Thomas <email address hidden> Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:29:55 -0400