Geek post: subpixel decimation and filtering on Linux

Of the three platforms I use on a daily basis (Linux on my office PC, OSX on my trusty if slowish Powerbook, and WinXP on my wife's laptop) I think I like WinXP's Cleartype fonts best. Actually, OSX's rendering is not "worse" than XP's---it's just different. Hinting seems to be lighter, and the emphasis is on getting font shapes right, rather than maximizing crispness. This is probably a good thing if you are a graphics / desktop publishing person trying to get a feel for how your document will look on paper. But, in terms of crispness, XP wins.

Unfortunately, Linux font rendering used to fall quite a bit behind both. Until last week. David Turner (of Freetype fame) released a set of patches to Xft2 and Cairo that (finally!) implement decent filtering of subpixel-rendered fonts. You are much better off getting the details from the source, but the results are really quite impressive. I upgraded from Ubuntu Breezy to Dapper last week, and today I installed the .deb's that a very kind soul has made available. Really, really sweet!