Font color/hinting change to less readable from Gnome 43

[keresztes.tamas]

From Gnome 43, the font changed from black to grey, or the hinting changed. Is there any way to change the color of the desktop font somehow? I try to create my own theme for that, but I can’t change the desktop font (Nautilus for example) color to black. I tried pre Gnome 43 distros, RHEL9, Debian 11, OpenSUSE Leap, font color is black and clear. After 43 is grey and thin in every distro. Debian 12, Fedora 38,… So is anyone know a way to restore the font color or hinting to pre43?

[ebassi (Emmanuele Bassi)]

Create a $HOME/.config/gtk-4.0/settings.ini file that sets gtk-hint-font-metrics to true.

[keresztes.tamas]

I did that after install in every distro what I’ve tested. It doesn’t help on this. It seems it’s not a hinting related thing, maybe the font color changed from black to grey

[mazharhussain]

Yes, the color seems to have changed.

To test this, you can put the following line in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/gtk-4.0/gtk.css.

@define-color window_fg_color black;

It will fix the issue in the light theme but completely break the dark theme.

[keresztes.tamas]

Hi
Thank you, this was the solution, I search it from months, thank you.
I extended it with some other values :
define-color window_fg_color black;
@define-color view_fg_color black;
@define-color headerbar_fg_color black;
@define-color sidebar_fg_color black;
@define-color secondary_sidebar_fg_color black;
@define-color card_fg_color black;
@define-color thumbnail_fg_color black;
@define-color dialog_fg_color black;
@define-color popover_fg_color black;