https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=55753
--- Comment #1 from Guy Stalnaker jimmyg521@gmail.com --- Follow up - I remembered that the Windows Registry has some keys related to fonts and font substitutions. A quick Google lead me to edit some of these keys:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes]
There are several that seem related to this issue:
MS Shell Dlg MS SHell Dlg 2
The default value of these two keys was Tahoma. A bit of experimentation reveals that modifying the keys value produces changes to the font used for the dialog/model dialog boxes (that is, modifying the key, closing RegEdit, then option winecfg, produces the following results):
- Tahoma (default) - font unaliased - Arial - no change, font unaliased - Ubuntu - no change, font unaliased - SegoeUI - no change, font unaliased - Verdana - no change, font unaliased - hack - used, font aliased! - Inter - used, font aliased! - Lato - used, font aliased! - monofur - used, font aliased!
I have many fonts installed on my system, some from the distribution repository, some via winetricks, and some manually (these installed both system-wide, and locally).
Some of these fonts are "found" by wine, used on the dialog/modal dialogs and correctly aliased. But some are not, including the defaults as set in the default registry installed when wine is installed, or modified by winetricks when it modifies some of the keys. Arial and Verdana are installed as part of the mstcorefonts package. Ubuntu is installed from the MXLinux repositories. Tahoma and SegoeUI are installed via winetricks, without changes (still unaliased) and, for testing, in my local font folder (still, unaliased).
The four fonts which wine does use and which are antialiased are installed by from the MXLinux repository and in my local .fonts/ folder. So, wine is successfully finding and using fonts through out the system, but it's not using them all in the same way.
So it seems that in some way, wine is not correctly finding fonts, or is using the wrong fonts, or something else. I have not done an exhaustive run through all the fonts I have (multiple 100s), but at least these four work as expected. So, I am not as down the river as I was because I can set the MS Shell Dlg key to a font that is antialiased such that I can read them without picking up a magnifying glass (that's what I've had to do). But I'm not closing the bug, because the registry defaults for four different wine installations did not antialias the font on the dialogs, which did not happen in the previous version of MXLinux and wine.