I have taken the plunge and decided to stick with a Slackware 12 installation. The main reason I was still using 11 was that I was happier with the way fonts looked in 12 as compared to 11.

So now I have a fresh installation of 12 with freetype recompiled.

Now I am using the same font settings that I had in 11. Anti-aliasing is enabled excluding ranges 0- 10.0pt.

I had sub-pixel hinting enabled and this produced quite definite coloured fringes on vertical lines. I never saw these with 11. So things look better to me with sub-pixel hinting turned off. I am a little surprised by this. I had thought that sub-pixel hinting would make the fonts look better on an LCD.

it depends how you have sub-pixel hinting configured. Sub-pixel hinting can be configured with :

RGB
BGR
VRGB
VBGR

all except RGB make sub-pixel hinting worse by causing colored vertical lines. Use RGB and Full in your configuring of sub-pixel hinting

I had it on medium. Full is much better!

Thanks