Full font hinting for urxvt in Ubuntu 19.04?

Question

I'm running 19.04 and I followed Full font hinting not working in Ubuntu 18.04 to enable full font hinting. It works for graphical applications such as Chromium, but not my terminal (urxvt). How do I enable full font hinting for urxvt?

Edit:

Here is a side-by-side screenshot of urxvt (left) vs. emacs (right). emacs' font is slightly crisper. I'll admit the difference doesn't look that impressive, but at work I use a 4K monitor with the resolution set to 1920x1080, and for whatever reason the difference is much more pronounced.

Here are the contents of my ~/.Xresources:

URxvt.foreground: #F2F2F2
URxvt.background: #000000
URxvt.font: xft:Monospace:size=15
URxvt.perl-ext-common: selection-to-clipboard,font-size
URxvt.font-size.step: 1
URxvt.keysym.C-equal: perl:font-size:increase

/* stop Ctrl-Shift from entering ISO 14755 mode */
URxvt.iso14755: false
URxvt.iso14755_52: false

/* font-size plugin from https://github.com/majutsushi/urxvt-font-size */

Can you include a side-by-side image of Chromium and urxvt? – DK Bose May 15 '19 at 03:33 — DK Bose, May 15 '19 at 03:33
And what do you have in *~/.Xresources*? – DK Bose May 15 '19 at 03:43 — DK Bose, May 15 '19 at 03:43
I edited my question to include the requested information. – jth May 15 '19 at 04:32 — jth, May 15 '19 at 04:32

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 15 '19 at 04:26

Full font hinting is done with lines like Xft*hintstyle: hintfull and Xft*hinting: true. They can be added to your ~/.Xdefaults file. Here are some lines in mine:

Xft*dpi: 82
Xft*antialias: true
Xft*hinting: true
Xft*rgba: rgb
Xft*autohint: false
Xft*hintstyle: hintfull
Xft*lcdfilter: lcddefault

URxvt*letterSpace: -2

There are many things that you can add like also choosing different fonts, etc. You can play around with the settings till you get something you like. Everybody's different.:

URxvt.intensityStyles: false
URxvt.allow_bold: false
URxvt.font: xft:Ubuntu Mono:style=Regular:pixelsize=17
URxvt.boldFont: xft:Ubuntu Mono:style=Bold:pixelsize=17  
URxvt.saveLines: 8192

After you launch urxvt it should look something like the following:

Hope this helps (some)!

Thank you, I will try this out tomorrow and report the results. — jth, May 15 '19 at 04:37
@jth These lines could also be added to your `~/.Xresources`. I've only used the `~/.Xdefaults` but I don't think it matters as I think they both load just fine. — Terrance, May 15 '19 at 13:43

Full font hinting for urxvt in Ubuntu 19.04?

1 Answers1