https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1469712
--- Comment #4 from Andreas M. Kirchwitz amk@krell.zikzak.de --- Great hint! That seems to work really fine for most applications including GTK (Menus, Titles, other texts), Firefox and Thunderbird (that's were I personally use non-antialiased "Arial" the most).
However, now with Arial defined to be non-antialiased again (like I did in Fedora 25 and before), suddenly Google Chrome totally freaks out. (It worked fine in previous Fedora releases.)
For unknown reasons Chrome seems to disable "hinting" as soon as a font is non-antialiased. The very same menus and other texts that look fine in Firefox, they are basically unreadable in Chrome. It doesn't matter if/how FREETYPE_PROPERTIES is set, Chrome seems to ignore it completely. Maybe Chrome cannot handle the new version of the freetype library.
(Even with Anti-Aliasing turned off, Hinting is still essential to have nicely rendered fonts.)
The problem is that a lot of web sites use "Arial" as default font, so it must look good in Firefox and Chrome. (Even for systems with Arial installed, same applies for the replacement font... it must look good in both browsers.)
In Fedora 25 and before Chrome basically ignored fontconfig. Even if I configured "Arial" to be non-antialiased, Chrome displayed it antialiased. That was okay. I rarely use Chrome, and I could live with antialiased Arial in Chrome if at least the hinting worked. In Fedora 26 Chrome now respects the non-antialiased configuration but fails with the hinting.