subpixel hinting in Mandriva 2008 is unavailable

[coverup]

Subpixel hinting is disabled in the KDE fonts menu (the button is grey) on my Mandriva 2008 system. How can it be enabled without recompiling everything? The laptop has Intel 3100 graphic card if that's relevant.

[coverup]

I am answering my own post for the benefit of those who might have had the same question... I just installed libfreetype6 from the PLF repository, and that was it.

 

On my screen, this actually turned things to a worse - fonts became sharper, but thinner and harder to read. It also turned out that the change could not be reversed... unless you are willing to take risk :D Download libfreetype6 rpm from the Mandriva repository, then as root

#rpm -i --force libfreetype6-2.3.5-2mdv2008.0.i586.rpm

This will install Mandriva's version of libfreetype6 alongside with that from PLF. Now you can uninstall the PLF version in a usual way via MCC or urpmi. This will leave only libfreetype6-2.3.5-2mdv2008.

[coverup]

The best solution to the problem of fuzzy looking fonts was to turn on autohinting by adding the following section to ~/.fonts.conf (at the very end, right before </fontconfig>)

 

<match target="pattern" >
<edit mode="assign" name="autohint" >
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>

 

This may or may not work without libfreetype6 from the PLF repo. I did install it but was not satisfied with the result.