Your post sparked my interest. In Control Centre I have anti-aliasing turned on for all font sizes. I have to say, all the fonts look great. If I turn on the Exclude Range, font between 8pt and 15pt look terrible. By default, I have KDE set to to 10 pt. Do you know of any draw backs to using AA on all font sizes?
I've done some googling on this issue with the bytecode interpreter and apparently, freetype2 includes an autohinter (?). I have read claims that the autohinter is suppose to be better than the bytecode interpreter. What are your thoughts on this?
When i excluded the fonts between 8 and 15pts before working on the bytecode interpreter, they also looked terrible, but they did not look perfect either even if i enabled AA for all font sizes. In fact, they looked blurry to say the least. On a CRT screen, this blurryness does not jump into the eye as it does on an LCD panel, so maybe you didn't observe it as i did. My post describes why the small sized fonts look terrible if AA *and* the bytecode interpreter are disabled. I suggest that you give it a try: Enable the bytecode interpreter, then disable AA for sizes less than 15pts. I have also read posts that say that the huge increase in crispness can only be observed for truetype fonts of windows legacy, which is where my fonts came from. Maybe if you use the bitstream fonts, your results are different. Check for example the fonts Verdana and Tahoma (yes, i harvested them from my windows partition), which i like very much on my box. Especially Verdana has very symmetric and upright glyphs which are very readable at small sizes without AA. Robert