[ft] Tweaking/Improving FreeType Antialiasing

[Galen P. Zink]

I've never been terribly happy with the antialiasing under various  
Linux distributions. I'm not sure if this is a personal preference  
issue or what, but suffice to say, it has been my largest complaint  
about using Linux on the desktop - the fonts look like utter crap to  
me. I can adapt to different interfaces - there are pluses and  
minuses to every way of doing something - but the anti-aliasing under  
Linux has always been kind of like going from Lindt chocolate to  
Hershey's chocolate, at least to me.

I'm particularly leaning towards Fedore Core 5 as the distribution in  
which I wish to apply improved anti-aliasing. My first assumption  
regarding the anti-aliasing was that it was related to the disabling  
of auto-hinting. So I looked into ways to enable the bytecode  
interpreter. ( http://www.carcosa.net/jason/blog/computing/ 
fonts-2006-04-19-20-12.html ) But that doesn't seem to really change  
the rendering much.

Let me show you a screenshot from FC5 with subpixel anti-aliasing,  
using the MS Verdana font and FreeType 2.1.10 with bytecode on:
http://zinkconsulting.com/fc5-bytecode.png

Now, take a look at it under OS X - same font - with "lighter" and  
"normal" settings with subpixel anti-aliasing using the standard OS X  
font rendering:
http://zinkconsulting.com/osx-lighter.png
http://zinkconsulting.com/osx-aa.png

There are flaws, in my view, with the OS X rendering, but it is (to  
me) an absolute night and day improvement over the stuff in FC5.  
Similarly, Adobe's CoolType (when properly configured) can look  
pretty much as good as OS X as well.

Is it even possible to get FreeType rendering text that even comes  
close to the OS X screenshots? If it's not possible with FreeType, is  
there some library I could drop in place of FreeType to get text that  
(to me) actually looks really good?

I do realize people have difference preferences in terms of the look/ 
feel of their fonts, but hopefully you can help me achieve the  
appearance I'm seeking.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated...

Thanks,

Galen