fonts are slightly off everywhere

[dkuettel]

Hi,

hyprland overall works very beautifully, but somehow I cannot get the fonts to look crisp. They are ever so subtly smoothed but it's definitely there. Comparing the same webpage in firefox between hyprland and dwm makes it very clear. Searching the wiki and the web brought nothing, but I feel like my setup is not that particular and that others must have it too.

Some info:

• I do use firefox --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland
• things like env = NIXOS_OZONE_WL,1 and env = MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND,1 didnt affect anything
• my fontconfig is the same as in dwm, but playing around with hinting styles and antialiasing and subpixel layouts doesnt help regardless
• alacritty (my terminal) shows the same behaviour
• my monitor config is monitor=,3840x2160@160,0x0,auto,vrr,1, and wlr-randr shows it ends up using a scale of 1.5x
• using scale 1 and zooming in in firefox doesnt make the font better which is very unexpected

In general, is fractional scaling responsible for such a thing? Or is that not anymore an issue like it used to be in X?

Any pointers are very much appreciated.

Small update: I quickly tried a baseline configuration for sway (https://swaywm.org/) and there the fonts look the same as in dwm. I guess it's not fundamentally broken in wayland and must have to do with my settings in hyprland?

As a side question: Is it possible that the mouse speed is affected by the monitor scale value? When I use 1 there it feels like it used to in dwm, but with 1.5 or even 2 it's definitely faster. Is that how it is intended?

Cheers, Daniel.

[vaxerski]

hyprland doesn't render the fonts, have you tried tinkering with your fontconfig?

[vaxerski]

it's unknown almost always, I was just making sure. I mean, is there a visible difference on screenshots?

[dkuettel]

first dwm, then hyprland

its not visible here, but the hyprland text is actually smaller ... so maybe i do have something somewhere that scales things after font rendering happened, that would explain the slight blur.

[dkuettel]

ok after more tinkering, I might have stumbled into a very obvious mess. fonts look fine when I use a monitor=,3840x2160@160,0x0,1,vrr,1 or monitor=,3840x2160@160,0x0,2,vrr,1, but not with auto because that selects a factor of 1.5. 1.5 is actually what I want, it's what I use on dwm as well, but I need to understand the interplay there more with wayland clients and/or x clients. A factor of 2 is clearly too big, and 1 is too small for my eyes :)

[vaxerski]

What is the app? In general, for sharp fonts on fractional scaling, your app should support the fractional_scaling protocol. Otherwise, it does a MacOS and scales by 2 then scales down, making fonts a bit wonky.

[dkuettel]

makes sense, i wasnt aware of this before. my current approach is to stick with scale 1 as far as wayland/hyprland is concerned and set the right gtk and gnome settings and what not to get the right sizes for my dpi