It is right that Slackware's got the bytecode interpreter disabled by default. There's a comment on that in the Slack 12 changelog concerning freetype, but PV added one of the patches floating around in the Internet.

On notebooks, the subpixel hinting stuff is also always an option to try with different settings. (Check the appropriate freetype header file; there more than just the bytecode interpreter to enable/disable.)

There's at least two freetype patches for subpixel stuff out there and at least one to change something font-related in Cairo, as Daedra mentioned.

I had a perfect combination of all that for my taste, but I forgot what I actually patched and installed... :/

Read first, post later, Su-Shee.

Daedra, thank your _very_ much for the Slack 12 packages, your ront rendering taste is exactly what I had already with all my patching on Slack 11.

Wonderful.

This is in short the three patches editing xft, cairo and freetype plus enabling subpixel hinting and the bytecode interpreter in freetype and editing the aflatin.c file?

(I just installed blindly your packages..)

Yup, thats exactly what they are, hope they work out for you.

I also have the actual patches on my site to if you want to compile the programs yourself.

Works perfectly.

I've got old patches "from somewhere" I've changed myself to make them apply. (I REALLY wanted the font stuff look nice...)

The difference is incredible...

I grabbed your packages and the "currentfreetypepatches.tar.bz2" from your site - I assume the cairo-1.2.x patch still applies to cairo 1.4.x?

Allright a big thanks Daedra!

Used your packages and tips, and fonts look just great now. I'm really happy with it.

I think i'll tweak them some more, but i'm already pretty much satisfied.

It's probably to late now, but yes the cairo patch has been updated to work with 1.4.10