Re: Xft support (freetype, anti-aliasing) in X11 emacs

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

On Sun, Oct 06, 2002 at 01:44:43AM +0200, Jan D. wrote:
> To me anti aliased fonts don't look smoother, they just look out of focus.
> My stupid eyes tries to focus, but to no avail, since the "out of focus"
> isn't really real.  I get a headache instead.

Isn't it generally held that only very large and very small type sizes should
be anti-aliased?  I find that in both these cases, it helps quite a bit,
though with large fonts I suppose it's more of an aesthetic improvement than
anything else.  I'd think that any decent system would allow you to set the
thresholds where antialiasing kicks in...

Part of the problem, of course, is when you simply don't have a good range of
hand-made bitmap fonts, and have to use scalable fonts -- and scalable fonts
at small sizes are often almost unreadable without anti-aliasing, and usually
pretty ugly even at `normal' sizes.  [also, complicated characters like those
in Chinese/Japanese are often unreadable even at `normal' sizes in scalable
fonts; maybe all the fonts I use have sucky hinting or something though]

-Miles
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