How to make fonts show anti-aliased on Linux/X11?

Question

With Linux/X11, certain font's show without anti-aliasing.

JetBrains Mono
Cascadia Code
These two fonts show with anti-aliasing in other programs (st terminal for example).
All other fonts show with anti-aliasing (Source Code Pro, Fira Code Medium, Courier Code, Monoid).
This is the feature-set of emacs XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG RSVG IMAGEMAGICK SOUND GPM DBUS GSETTINGS GLIB NOTIFY ACL GNUTLS LIBXML2 FREETYPE M17N_FLT LIBOTF XFT ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS GTK3 X11 XDBE XIM MODULES THREADS LIBSYSTEMD LCMS2

Any hints on how to resolve this?

This is X11 with JetBrains Mono-13 font, I think this is related to Emacs, not fontconfig, since the st terminal displays the font properly.

This is emacs -nw running in st terminal.

Which build variant of Emacs is this? Specifically, are you using Cairo and Harfbuzz? (check system-configuration-features to find out). — rpluim, Jan 24, 2020 at 14:30
In case this isn’t obvious, this isn’t what emacs is supposed to look like. — Dan Robertson, Jan 24, 2020 at 22:51
Updated with system-configuration-features and a screenshot of the same font in st. — ideasman42, Jan 25, 2020 at 3:49

ideasman42 · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-25 18:31:34Z

3

Found a solution, neither of these fonts define themselves as mono-spaced, the solution is to force this.

This can be done in fonts.conf or through the font specifier.

Modifying the fonts.conf is meant to work too, although I couldn't get it working. See link.

answered Jan 25, 2020 at 15:58

ideasman42

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You're using an XFT build. Lots of font-related things, especially with newer fonts like JetBrain Mono, tends to work a lot bettwe in a Cairo+Harfbuzz build.
– rpluim
Jan 26, 2020 at 20:59
From what I've read Cairo build is currently unstable (as of Emacs 26)
– ideasman42
Feb 18, 2020 at 22:51

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