Monaco font not antialiased in some GTK apps

Solution 1:

Use older monaco font instead of the latest one solved this issue for me.

Solution 2:

The font has an embedded bitmap version for certain font sizes. Turn it off in fontconfig:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>

    <!-- ...other settings can be here... -->

    <match target="font">
        <test name="family">
            <string>Monaco</string>
        </test>
        <edit name="embeddedbitmap">
            <bool>false</bool>
        </edit>
    </match>

</fontconfig>

If you have fontconfig 2.10 or newer, put this in ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf. With older versions, edit ~/.fonts.conf.

To change this system-wide, edit /etc/fonts/conf.d/fix-monaco.conf.

You can also disable embedded bitmaps for all fonts, by removing the <test ...> line. In my experience, embedded bitmaps are never useful; they always make the font ugly.