How can I change font rendering to sub-pixel BGR ordering?

Question

In Ubuntu 11.10, I can't find a way to change the sub-pixel byte ordering to BGR. I have a BGR monitor and fonts look blurry because of this. I've installed gnome-tweak-tool but I can't find an option for the sub-pixel ordering. This used to be easy to do with the old font settings window.

Solution 1

You can do this using a GUI (dconf-editor from the package dconf-tools) or on the command-line:

GUI

1. Open dconf-editor
2. In the left pane, go to /org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/xsettings
3. In the right pane, change the value of the rgba-order key to bgr:

Command-line

Just run:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xsettings rgba-order 'bgr'

Solution 2

You also may want to change system-wide font settings (and re-login afterwards):

ln -s ../conf.avail/10-sub-pixel-bgr.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d

This fixes sub-pixel rendering on Google Chrome for me, too.

Comments

[allyourcode]

What if I have one monitor in portrait, and another in landscape? Can I set the subpixel order for each monitor independently? AFAICT, this is unpossible, but perhaps, I'm missing something?

[allyourcode]

Also, Chrome does not seem to use this setting. Is there a way I can set this in Chrome?

[Casey Murray]

Command -line for gsettings worked perfectly here, thanks!

[phk]

@allyourcode Looking at some possibly related bug reports at crbug.com it seems like Chrome does not really support vertical subpixel layouts and switching to grayscale AA seems to be the only alternative (go to chrome://flags/#lcd-text-aa for that).

[Mikko Rantalainen]

This no longer seems to work with Google Chrome version 75.0. I, too, have a BGR display and both Chrome and Firefox do incorrect subpixel rendering.