How do I make urxvt render xft fonts?

Question

I wonder whether there's a way to make urxvt render xft fonts:

URxvt.font: xft:Droid Sans Mono Slashed:pixelsize=9:Regular
URxvt.boldFont: xft:Droid Sans Mono Slashed:pixelsize=9:Bold
URxvt.talicFont: xft:Droid Sans Mono Slashed:pixelsize=9:Italic
URxvt.bolditalicFont: xft:Droid Sans Mono Slashed:pixelsize=9:Bold:Italic

If I try this, I get something like:

So it scales pretty bad:

 ! Fonts
 Xft.dpi:        132
 Xft.antialias:  true
 Xft.rgba:       rgb
 Xft.hinting:    true
 Xft.autohint:  true
 Xft.hintstyle:  hintfull   

I'm not sure whether this is one of the reaons. However I want antialias and that Droid. Is there any trick here?

Solution 1

urxvt will use a default font if it cannot find the xft font name you specify. For example, the following will look like your screenshot:

urxvt -fn 'xft:foo'

To find out which xft fonts you have available, run:

fc-list

Here is how I run urxvt with the beautiful Ubuntu Monospace font:

urxvt -fn "xft:Ubuntu Mono:pixelsize=14,style=regular"

Solution 2

If I remember, the spacing was fixed by

URxvt*letterSpace: -2

This is my .Xresources:

Xft.dpi:                    96
Xft.antialias:              true
Xft.rgba:                   rgb
Xft.hinting:                true
Xft.hintstyle:              hintslight

URxvt.depth: 0

URxvt.intensityStyles:  false                                       
! Turn it on here... (then boldFont)
URxvt.allow_bold:       false                                        
URxvt.font:             xft:Ubuntu Mono:style=Regular:pixelsize=17
! ... but put this on Regular, else the ls output is overly fat
URxvt.boldFont:         xft:Ubuntu Mono:style=Bold:pixelsize=17  
URxvt.saveLines:        8192


! Fix font space
! any larger than -1 I dont like
URxvt*letterSpace: -2                                               

Solution 3

I got it just working with command line option "-letsp -1", see also

http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2009/11/how-make-urxvt-look-gnome-terminal/

Comments

[balu]

That's funny because both Xft.rgba: rgb (instead of none) and Xft.hintstyle: hintslight (and hintfull) trigger the described behavior for me. See unix.stackexchange.com/a/189856/85186

[Janus Troelsen]

does this work with unicode characters? i am having some problems with ttyp0, gohufont and this way of specifying fonts