Like (I suppose) many of you, I have recently upgraded to freetype-2.3.1. After the upgrade I found my fonts suddenly changed from this:

to this:

which is supposedly an improvement — albeit one that I do not like. I have just spent far too much time on trying to figure out how to get my fonts back to normal and so I thought I’d share my solution with you. It turns out the only thing you have to do is to put the following snippet of code into your /etc/fonts/local.conf:

<match target="font">
	<edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
		<bool>true</bool>
	</edit>
	<edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
		<bool>false</bool>
	</edit>
	<edit name="hinting" mode="assign">
		<bool>true</bool>
	</edit>
	<edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign">
		<const>hintfull</const>
	</edit>
	<edit name="rgba" mode="assign">
		<const>none</const>
	</edit>
</match>

The most crucial bit seems to be the hintstyle. Unless it’s set to hintfull, the fonts look just like they do with the default settings, or worse.