I use emacs a lot. Emacs is not antialiased (although I've previously discussed a patch on this). But how to get it to look nice on Linux, without using antialiased fonts? I really had no idea, even though I used emacs every day on Linux for a long time. Today I stumbled upon this Usenet thread, which talks about fonts on Linux. I learned the following things from this thread: (1) the default font rasterizer on XFree86 sucks. (2) The freetype one for truetype fonts is better, but almost all truetype fonts aren't made for the screen, and so don't have any good font hinting. (3) Basically only a few Microsoft fonts on TrueType are truly readable. I selected one of these "Monotype - Times New Roman" for my emacs default, and it is actually much more readable than before. So if you use emacs or any other non-antialiased program, use this font. Grab it off your Windows machine. It used to be a free download from Microsoft, but not anymore.
Posted by ahyatt at December 4, 2003 03:29 PM