Certain Characters Aren't Anti-Aliased

Question

This is a problem that I've had under Linux-based systems for a while, and I don't know if there's a remedy for it.
At around system font sizes (10-12), under both GNOME and Xfce, certain characters aren't anti-aliased (for example, Japanese characters) in certain programs (Firefox and Pidgin are the two main ones, but I recall there being others).  I'm assuming that all of these characters are currently being used from other TTFs that I've installed, because DéjàVu doesn't seem to have them.  At larger sizes in these programs, and at all sizes in LibreOffice, I don't seem to have this problem.
Is this a problem with GTK, these apps specifically, or my configuration?  I currently have fonts for GNOME and Xfce set to greyscale anti-aliasing and full hinting, if that helps.  What I want is for these characters to be anti-aliased, because it looks very odd when they're showing as monochrome against a bunch of anti-aliased letters.  As far as I can tell, the hinting still works, however.

Answer 1

You most likely have the use of bitmap fonts or embedded bitmaps enabled somewhere in your /etc/fonts/conf.d. Once you find something like
<selectfont>
    <acceptfont>
        <pattern>
            <patelt name="scalable"><bool>true</bool></patelt>
        </pattern>
    </acceptfont>
</selectfont>
or
<match target="font">
    <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
        <bool>true</bool>
    </edit>
</match>
and change them to "false", you should be fine.