As part of my quest for "perfect" fonts in Linux on my LCD monitor, I stumbled across some patches that David Turner of freetype.org put out in 2006. They modify cairo and libXft to use significantly better subpixel rendering techniques. The patches I found to work were from Jaganath's page. I started getting annoyed when I would update Fedora and these libraries would be overwritten, requiring me to download, patch and recompile updated source code. So, I figured out how to make RPM packages instead, which suprisingly took very little time to figure out and are much more portable and generally easy to deal with. In many cases, the rendering now looks superior to any other OS I've seen. Jim Bevenhall's page provides similar packages.
For Fedora 11, I have redesigned how the packages work. They used to replace the original packages. Now, they use ldconfig to override the existing packages. This makes installation and uninstallation a breeze, and Fedora updates to the original packages shouldn't stop the modified packages from working. I chose the suffix "freeworld" because it seemed like that is the agreed upon suffix in the FOSS world for stuff like this. I am no longer providing the freetype packages, as those are already available at rpmfusion.org. Once you install rpmfusion, you would do this:
yum install freetype-freeworld.i586yum install freetype-freeworld.x86_64 (if you are running x64, I recommend installing both)Then, download these packages and in the download directory do:
yum install *.rpm
)Keep in mind that the cairo packages also have an additional tweak to make them respect fontconfig settings (~/.fonts.conf and/or /etc/fonts/local.conf). This means that hinting type, antialiasing, etc. must be configured through those files, not through gnome-appearance-properties.
Sample Image:
