I spent some time debugging a font rendering issue after recent fontconfig changes on Linux.

At first I thought fontconfig itself was "broken", but after testing multiple setups I realized the issue was mostly related to how Iosevka behaved with the newer font matching/rendering changes.

Issue/MR related to this:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/fontconfig/fontconfig/-/work_items/522
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/fontconfig/fontconfig/-/merge_requests/520

The funny part is that this ended up helping me discover a new font family:
IoskeleyMono (https://github.com/ahatem/IoskeleyMono)

After testing it in:

• st
• dwm
• Firefox
• Senpai IRC
• Geany
• websites/forums

the rendering and spacing ended up being MUCH better for my workflow, especially the "Term" variant.

Sometimes a small issue sends you in the right direction 🙂

I liked it so much that I already prepared and submitted a SlackBuild.

Huge thanks to the developers working on fontconfig and font rendering. People usually only notice this work when something changes, but good typography and font matching matter a lot on a daily desktop system.

#x11 #fontconfig #fonts #slackware #ioskeleymono