Don't Be Confused Disable Rainbow Text!
Hello Trisquel this is my first post and for that first post I thought I would make an informatic post to hopefully help people with a pretty significant problem, it is likely most people aren't aware they possess!
Hmm, I'm not sure when this problem started specifically, which would be interesting to discover, I think it has evolved to effect different applications specifically over time, and applications throughout Trisuqel! Oh no!
Basically because of new features with text rendering, the text on our screens, and in different applications, can appear to have confusing rainbow text! Which slows down the essential fundamental activity, of reading! Plus, comprehending what is read!
Now I am a lover of dark backgrounds, with light text, which makes the text on my screen rainbow colored by default.
If other users use a light background, they can have a similar effect, that is less pronounced or apparent, with black text.
So essentially the fix is actually really simple, for the desktop, and most apps, the basic font settings can fix the situation. On mate, under it's font settings, it is called font smoothing, and turning it off or to grayscale will disable the multi-colored, red green blue and black/white pixels that make text look rainbow colored.
Then for abrowser, it uses it's own built in font settings, and does not inherit the font settings of the host operating system, like most other applications do. So then to disable the rainbow text in abrowser, we must navigate to about:config in the url box, and search for a setting with the string "pixel" called gfx.webrender.enable-subpixel-aa, which by default is set to true, and then disable it, to false to render normal text without multicolored pixels finally.
Basically in different applications/desktop environments, I understand, this setting goes by different names, and after playing around with settings and reloading apps for several hours one day, I finally figured out, that it was simply these single settings that fixed the problem.
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Now I just bounced around and did some testing, so for either black text or white text, the "subpixel" rendering will create the rainbow text effect.
Here's a picture that shows what text actually looks like with the rainbow effect turned on, and another that shows what it looks like with it off. It's difficult to notice, so clearly, without zooming in onto the text, so we can see the individual pixels for each letter in a word, and it makes a very big difference when reading, that is subtle, or subliminal, difficult to notice, but highly confusing or prohibitive. Simply turn the setting off, and voila! Improve reading comprehension by 100% instantly.
(slight edit, the webrender subpixel setting in abrowser should be for webpages specifically I think, and the settings menus in abrowser, use a different setting(possibly inheriting the desktops font settings))
Cmon guys not even our pixels are safe anymore : D
This is still a major, critical, severe issue most people are totally unaware of.
If anyone on trisquel.info wants to help, they can identify how to turn off the confusing disabling rainbow (multi-colored) text effect in other desktop environments, and applications on Trisquel.
I've noted at the top, that for the Mate desktop environment, we can disable the confusing rainbow text by changing the font smoothing setting to disabled or grayscale.
Now, for xfce the setting is under the appearance, and font settings, and is called "Sub-pixel order," so to disable the confusing rainbow text there, we can simply turn off that setting. (changing it to "none")
Then, other Trisquel users will use the other cd's, and desktop environments listed on it's download page https://trisquel.info/en/download so we still need to learn how to disable the confusing rainbow text in lxde for the trisquel mini cd, kde, for the triskel cd, and "sugar toast" for the "sugar" learning, environment.
Also any other applications we can identify that do not inherit the underlying desktops settings for font rendering, or that override the underlying desktops settings for font rendering, need investigation for a complete resolution.