If you look closely, Kana appears a little thicker than Kanji and Latin characters. Hangeul also appears thicker just like the Kana.

It seems to affect Dolphin and Strawberry. But I noticed that the Firefox file picker is fine:

Actually, Firefox itself is completely fine and I’m pretty sure it just uses Noto fonts as well. Fonts on Discord are also okay.

One thing I did notice is that “Noto Sans CJK” (JP/KR/SC/TC/etc) DOES appear thicker in the Font System Settings of KDE. This is what “Noto Sans Regular” looks like:

And this is what “Noto Sans CJK” looks like:

Notice that both “Regular” text do not appear to be the same. The CJK one is thicker.

Right now, a work-around is to set my main font as “Noto Sans CJK” but set it to “Light” instead of “Regular” and it looks pretty good:

But the Monospace Noto Sans CJK is thick as well with no option to make it lighter. Not as much of an issue as the graphical apps though:

This is a fresh install of Fedora 43 KDE btw. Hope someone can help me out here before I nuke this install for Bazzite, CachyOS, or something else lol

  • hitagi@ani.socialOPEnglish
    1·
    18 hours ago

    For all/relevant encodings?

    As far as I understand (Firefox Font settings, using fc-match, fontconfig, etc), it’s properly configured.

    Have you considered that maybe Noto developers made a choice there, to render Kanjoi thicker than Chinese characters?

    Assuming you meant Kana (and Hangeul as well), I’m not sure why they would do that because it makes it appear so inconsistent.

    I know, that doesn’t explain why Dolphin would render them in a way that is more pleasing to you. Have you tried using other fonts altogether?

    You mean Firefox (and the Firefox file picker) because Dolphin doesn’t render it well at all. I actually tested a few things. I uninstalled the Noto Sans CJK package to see what other fonts it would fall back to. It falls back to Droid Sans and it looks pretty good in my opinion. It doesn’t become thick like Noto Sans CJK. So maybe it’s really something intentionally done by the Noto developers.

    BUT Noto Sans CJK looks fine in Firefox, LibreOffice, and GIMP.

    A few more things I tested:

    1. Bazzite live ISO on a virtual machine also has thick Kana and Hangeul (problem isn’t limited to Fedora KDE?)
    2. Flatpak Strawberry and Dolphin results in Chinese/Kanji becoming thick (???)
    3. Fedora GNOME renders CJK fine (KDE issue?)
    4. Nautilus on Fedora KDE renders CJK fine (Qt issue?)
    5. Changed the fallback font for ja and ko via ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf to Droid Sans Fallback (I also tried setting it to Noto Sans CJK Light), then confirming changes using fc-match. Restarted and cleared fc-cache. Dolphin and Strawberry did not respect my changes. Nautilus does though. (Qt issue?)
    6. Replaced CJK VF fonts with non-VF fonts. No difference.

    Something tells me it’s a KDE or Qt thing, or maybe it’s a Fedora thing? It works fine with GNOME and GTK apps like Nautilus. This is beyond what I know at this point so I’ll just post this over to the Fedora forums.