On Fri, 10 Jan 2003 Yoshiki.Ohshima at acm.org wrote:

>   Jim,
> 
> > Xft2 however, implements (a typical geekish name) "subpixel decimation",
> > which gives better results in font rendering for flat panels
> > that what goes under the names "Cleartype" (Microsoft) or Cooltype (Adobe).
> > It does not use the typical signal processing approaches, but leverages
> > the fact that the eye is a strong edge detector, so characters should be
> > rendered more strongly to pixel boundaries.  Essentially, only pixels that
> > would be jaggy get antialiased, and use the flat panel's RGB subpixels
> > to improve the character's sharpness when doing diagonal strokes.
> > We believe (if truetype hinting is turned on) we have something here
> > better than what you see elsewhere for text rendering.
> 
>   FYI, Henrik's "high-quality font support"
> (http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1225, the same link Bert was
> refering to) has the subpixel rendering feature.


... because it's based on Freetype 2, so Jim is a little bit preaching to 
the choir here ;-)

-- Bert