Fixing ugly Qt fonts in Openbox, Fluxbox, etc.

On Debian Squeeze at least, unless you are using GNOME or Xfce (or ostensibly KDE) or are running the configuration daemons that come with these, fonts rendered by Qt apps look like utter crap.

It seems that Qt honors neither ~/.fonts.conf, nor what's in ~/.fonts.conf.d, nor what's in /etc/fonts/conf.d. This is a problem if you want to run light-and-lean and not use the GNOME or Xfce daemons in Openbox, Fluxbox, and likely many other window managers.

After much hair pulling, I finally managed to work around the problem by using Xresources. Adding the code below to either ~/.Xresources (for user-only changes) or to a new file /etc/X11/Xresources/fonts-default (for system-wide changes) fixed the issue for me. It also fixes problems with ugly font rendering in OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice.

What I added is:

Xft.dpi: 96
Xft.antialias: true
Xft.hinting: true
Xft.rgba: rgb
Xft.autohint: false
Xft.hintstyle: hintslight
Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault

The dpi entry is there just for good measure. Change settings as needed according to taste.