Can't disable subpixel rendering in title bars

[imyxh]

So, I asked a question about this on Reddit a few months ago, but I guess I never reported a GitHub issue. I'm now fairly certain it's a bug so here we go.

The image above is a snapshot of my title bar. It's very clearly using subpixel rendering—which in my opinion, on my display, looks awful. To make it clearer, here's a screenshot of a screenshot in GIMP:

I have set my sway config like so:

# (in: ~/.config/sway/config)
output * subpixel none

I have also disabled it in conf.d:

$ file /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-no-sub-pixel.conf
/etc/fonts/conf.d/10-no-sub-pixel.conf: symbolic link to ../conf.avail/10-no-sub-pixel.conf

And for the most part, it works. Screenshot from terminal:

You can open that up in GIMP and tell that indeed, there is only grayscale antialiasing, and no subpixel rendering.

Mako, however ...

... also displays the same issue as the sway window titlebars. These tests are all using the same font (Iosevka 10). I've checked plenty of applications; for the most part, they all use grayscale antialiasing; even black-on-white text in Firefox uses grayscale. Everything—wayland and xwayland—seems to use my grayscale setting except Mako and the titlebars.

How may I help debug further to find the cause of this subpixel rendering? You would expect the output * subpixel none command to turn it off.

[progandy]

The renderers in sway and mako translate WL_OUTPUT_SUBPIXEL_NONE to subpixel antialias with default subpixel order. It should probably be changed to choose grayscale antialiasing instead.

• mako (you can create a bug over there)
• sway
• swaybar
• sway-wl-to-cairo

Edit: Or maybe extend it to "none" = no antialias, "gray" = grayscale, "default" = default subpixel. Another option may be to respect the fontconfig setup for the antialias settings and only change the subpixel order if subpixel rendering is requested by fontconfig.

By the way, if you think subpixel rendering looks bad by default, try the other pixel orders as well.
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/subpixel.php

[imyxh]

Wow, thanks! I actually can't reproduce this on swaybar as of today. Though I think I could a few months ago.

[imyxh]

Closed by PR5239. We can open a new issue if we want to further look at fontconfig.