Heya folks.
I’m not sure when exactly this happened since I don’t deal with Japanese text on a daily basis, but I noticed today while tagging some music that on Dolphin the Japanese text looked different, somehow. Like the lines look thicker now, or something?
I looked at the most recent Dolphin changes and nothing really stood out from there, so I then looked at some text in the browse view in Gwenview and I’m seeing the same there as well.
I’m not sure how well it plays in a screenshot, but here’s one anyway.
To me that Japanese looks ever so slightly thicker than the numbers and the latin alphabet, and it wasn’t like this before. I’m using 9pt Noto Sans across the board, if that matters.
Anyone else notice anything similar?
Could it be some some sub-pixel rendering change or something?
Or am I just seeing things? 
It’s really not easy to tell, it does look a bit fuzzy, but that might just be the overall screenshot.
I think you’ll have to expand on your setup a bit:
- What software versions are you on
- X11 or Wayland, did you “recently” change
- Screen resolution
- Font Anti-aliasing settings
I’m working quite a bit with Japanese fonts myself and I’m not having any issues, I’ll add an example screenshot (recreated your file in dolphin) to see how it compares:
I don’t really have any special settings for this, but I’m on Noto 10pt instead, on Wayland with 4k resolution.
I’m on latest non-beta versions of Dolphin and Gwenview (and everything else too I guess) on CachyOS, always been on Wayland, resolution at 3840x2160 with scaling at 200%.
These are the font settings but to be clear I haven’t changed these in more than 6 months at least, and this issue I noticed for the first time maybe 2 weeks ago.
I tried changing some stuff around with the sub-pixel rendering and hinting after I noticed it but none of it made the text look “right” again.
I would check if CachyOS changed its default fontconfig (probably in /usr/share/fontconfig). pacman -Qo /usr/share/fontconfig/* to find related packages, cat /var/log/pacman.log to find those updated recently, then check their distro repo git history if CachyOS has one.
As far as I can see fontconfig has been last updated 4 days ago, which is too recent, and before that the only other fontconfig upgrade dates back September last year. Noto-sans package has been upgraded too multiple times, but the noto-sans-cjk package hasn’t seen any updates in a long time.
