Re: Rendering with xft and hinting

[Dan Maas <dmaas dcine com>]

* Keith Packard (keithp keithp com) wrote:
> The notion that anti-aliasing should be turned off at any size is 
> certainly debatable today; anyone running at 1280x1024 or higher LCD 
> resolutions or 1600x1200 CRT should give pure AA text a try.

I know this is a highly subjective issue, but for what it's worth, on
my 1280x1024 laptop LCD I still prefer small characters to be rendered
without AA (in preference to every AA method I've tried, including
Xft, Win2K font smoothing, and Windows XP ClearType)... For web
browsing and word processing I don't really care, but AA does bother
me in console windows and GUI widgets. (intellectually I know that AA
is probably doing a better job of rasterizing the character, but after
any spending length of time with X or Windows XP, I always end up
disabling AA for small font sizes).

Maybe I'm reacting more to specific fonts than to AA text in
general... I haven't found many fonts that seem to be tweaked to look
really good at small sizes; and most of the ones I know of aren't free
:[.

Believe it or not, my favorite fonts of all time are MS Sans Serif
(the plain-jane default bitmapped font for Win32 GUIs) and the
TrueType Courier that comes with Windows. Show me a font that renders
better at small to moderate sizes, AA or not, and I'll switch
immediately...

Regards,
Dan