Hi all. I am facing problems with fonts rendering on my 2 different laptops. The only difference is in the OS: one runs Arch and the other runs Fedora. Both run latest i3wm and i3status and use the same config files.
On Fedora, the fonts are rendered beautifully with colors. On Arch, it is just black and white line. You can see them clearly here: https://imgur.com/a/QtJyRiJ. Top image is Arch and the bottom one is Fedora’s.
How do I get Arch to render just like the polybar on Fedora? For the font, on Arch , I installed ttf-font-awesome.
In LX Appearance, I would then have: Font Awesome 6, Font Awesome 6 Brands and Font Awesome 4 Compatibility.
On Fedora, I installed a bunch of stuff like fontawesome-6-free-fonts, fontawesome-6-brand-fonts and fontawesome-fonts-all.
Here, LX Appearance shows Font Awesome 6 and Font Awesome 4
In i3 config, I just have:
font pango:Font Awesome 12
to set the fonts. But the results are so much difference as you can see from the link.
Those aren’t fonts, those are icon sets.
Font Awesome is a font that uses codepoints in the “Private Use Area” for icons. (The Private Use Area is a chunk of Unicode specifically set aside for any font to put any image they want in there, instead of expecting a certain codepoint to display as a specific letter.)
To the OP: I don’t know much about this, but if you use a different app, does Arch’s Font Awesome show as the colored or B&W version? You might have to try a wide variety of apps due to competing color font standards.