Beware, this was just the "minimal user's overview" - font technology is really complex and I just got started reading.

(Understanding will hopefully follow some day.. )

Check the wikipedia articles about cairo - xft - freetype - pango, rather helpful, all of them.

And this Wikipedia article is a really nice and helpful read what all this font technology stuff is about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_rasterization

(What is hinting, what is subpixel rendering and which technologies do exist...)

Well its a while since I posted and I've had some pretty poor results to be honest. In the meantime, I've also got adjusted to the better rendered fonts in Linux after finally realizing that fonts in Windows truly look horrendous. But there still seems to be some work to be done.

Fonts change quality across different applications in Linux and this is very annoying. I downloaded Netbeans this week and if I am really honest the screen on my ZX Spectrum is more readable. As I have posted before, the text in these Quick Reply boxes is rendered very well for me - no lumps, bumps or blurriness.

I have completely disabled sub-pixel hinting and just stuck with anti-aliasing on my test KDE/Slackware setup and it is much better without the hinting. In fact, the hinting on all the Windows systems and an MacBook I've seen is awful. I don't know why Mac users get on a high about the interface because the fonts still aren't that great.

When I keep looking back at the text I modified in the Gimp with a greyscale pallette I can't understand why text can't be rendered smoothly in normal apps, not just graphics packages. I'm getting round to the thinking that programming contributions to font related software is what is needed with some good universal framework between distros. Particularly when you look at the link Su-Shee has left, hinting doesn't seem like a solution, or not a long term quality one anyway.

In the meantime, I'm getting my programing skills up to scratch and I'll take a look at what Gimp did when it smoothed off my text.