I am working on a desktop without antialiased fonts, as this is much sharper and clearer using small font sizes as I am doing. As desktop font I am using Microsoft’s Tahoma, as I think this is the most space saving and at the same time best looking font without using antialiasing. (If you know another one, please tell me!)

If you do and you are using Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, you probably will have noticed that the new versions (Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3) always use antialliased fonts. Even trying to change the setting

gfx.use_text_smoothing_setting

This bug is reported at Ubuntu’s Launchpad. I crawled through the comments and workarounds given there, and the solution which worked great for me without breaking any other stuff was the solution mentioned in comment #52. Save this as ~/.fonts.conf:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="rgba" >
   <const>rgb</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="hinting" >
	
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="hintstyle" >
   <const>hintfull</const>
  </edit>
 </match>
	
 <match target="font" >
  <edit mode="assign" name="antialias" >
   <bool>true</bool>
  </edit>
 </match>
</fontconfig>

Restart Thunderbird or Firefox.