Lex Spoon wrote:

>It is the lack of hinting that is the real problem, not the
>anti-aliasing.  Though I agree that without hinting, we do not want this
>to be a default font.
>
>For large point sizes, like in presentations, the fuzziness is not an
>issue at all.
>
>Anyway, what is the underlying technology?  We may be able to improve
>things.
>
>First, some people actually do have the necessary license to use the
>patented hinting mechanism.  Is there an option to turn this on?  Are we
>using freetype?  If so, then hinting is just a recompile away.
>

The current TTFont support is not based on Freetype, as far as I know.  
So we're not too close to supporting hinting.  If someone worked on 
supporting Freetype, we could look at including it.  (I vaguely recall 
there were some patent or somesuch issues with Freetype while ago, which 
may be resolved by now...)

There's also the Win32 native font support package which (I believe) 
does support hinting via the Win32 api, but that's not currently 
cross-platform.

- Doug