[ Thanks to Dan
Peak for this link. ]
“Fonts are nice little letter stylings that display text in
new and interesting ways. But, when you come down to it, a
character on the screen is just a collection of pixels. So why is
Linux limited in how it displays its fonts?“
“When X Window was designed, it was assumed that font pixels
came in one of two forms: black or white. Or green and black, or
red and white–the point was that there were just two colors:
foreground and background. Today, fonts use something called
anti-aliasing when they are displayed.”
“Anti-aliasing is a technique where grayscale pixels are
interspersed around the outlines of characters to give them a
smoother appearance. X, with its two-color mentality, can’t do
anti-aliasing, and thus the fonts look more jagged.”
“Still, fonts junkies like me still like to get a hold of
everything we can for our documents, and TrueType fonts are pretty
pervasive in the computer world.”