If this package is installed then anti-aliasing is disabled in
QT4 applications.  For example, if I run qtconfig-qt4, the
text in that application is blocky.  If I close it, purge
ttf-arphic-uming and then run qtconfig-qt4 again, the text
is nicely anti-aliased.

This has been reported on other distributions, such as:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=459680

Many thanks for looking into this issue.

regards,
mark

Mark Longair wrote:

Not a bug in this package.
The default fontconfig configuration on debian does not define if
anti-aliasing should be used by default or not. If you want your fonts
to be anti-aliased system wide, create a file
/etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-antialias.conf with the following contents:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<!--  Use anti-aliasing -->
  <match target="font">
    <edit name="antialias" mode="assign"><bool>true</bool></edit>
  </match>
</fontconfig>

Then link it to /etc/fonts/conf.d/ and everything is fine.

Cheers
Arne