The Xft library provides support for antialiased TrueType fonts, full Unicode, and an unbraindamaged font selection mechanism for X11.
It relies on fontconfig [L1 ], FreeType [L2 ], and the X Render extension (although it will still work if XRender is not available on the server). Xft 2.0 is included in most recent Linux distributions (circa May 2003). Mozilla, Qt, and GTk have all been updated to use Xft.
Experimental support for Xft in Tk 8.5 has been committed to the CVS HEAD (31 May 2003). See also patch #535541 [L3 ]. There are still (31 May 2003) a few quirks and bugs to be worked out, but overall it works pretty well.
To enable Xft support, run:
sh ./configure --enable-xft
make clean
makeMany thanks to Keith Packard for contributing the original code. Blame Joe English for the stuff that doesn't work right yet.
KPV I for one don't particularly like antialiased fonts--I find them fuzzy and hard to read. Joel on Software essay Three Wrong Ideas From Computer Science [L4 ] talks about the fallacy of antialiased fonts.
IDG I don't like them either. But then, I don't like syntax-colouring editors, so I'm clearly a weirdo!
DKF: I think he's not quite on the ball over AA fonts. More exactly, non-AA fonts are great if you require a font of exactly the size they provide (often the case for GUIs where font sizes can be controlled fairly well) but are awful if you're after some other size of font and the system has to fall back on its own rasterizer. (Previewing printable documents is one of the cases when you'll probably hit this problem.)