GTK+ Theme Style

This tab controls the visual appearance of the toolkit (Gtk+) controls, such as buttons and menus. You can switch between themes by selecting them in the list.

To install new themes, download a package from your distribution or from theme sites like xfce-look.org. When you download a theme tarball from a website, you can install it by dropping the file from the file manager in the list of styles.

Icon Theme

This tab controls the visual appearance of icons that visible in e.g. the panel, on the desktop, in the file manager and menus. You can choose a new icon theme by selecting a theme in the list.

Also here you can install new icon themes by dropping an icon tarball in the list or install a new theme using the distributions' package management.

The font selector button shows the name of the font and its point size. The name is also shown in bold, italic, or regular type.

To change the font, click the font selector button. The font picker dialog opens. Select the font family, style, and point size from the lists. The preview area shows your current choice. Click OK to accept the change and update the desktop.

Enable anti-aliasing

Select this option to anti-alias fonts, so that characters have smooth edges.

Hinting

Hinting is a font-rendering technique that improves the quality of fonts at small sizes and an at low screen resolutions. Select one of the options to specify how to apply hinting your fonts.

Sub-pixel order

Select one of the options to specify the subpixel color order for your fonts. Use this option for LCD or flat-screen displays.

LCD Hinting

On some systems LCD hinting gives better fonts, because this is not working on all system, this setting is not configurable through the interface. You can set it with a simple query.

xfconf-query -c xsettings -p /Xft/Lcdfilter -n -t string -s lcddefault

Other possible values are lcdnone, lcddefault, lcdlight and lcdlegacy. You can check if the property is set property, run xrdb -query in a terminal.

In case you want to override the DPI (dots per inch) value calculated by the X-server, you can select the checkbox and use the spin box to specify the resolution to use when your screen renders fonts.