The ORIGINAL core FONT rendering engine in XFree86 didn't SUPPORT AA fonts. However, for GTK+ 2.0 onwards, the Xft font rendering backend can be USED to render antialiased fonts. To select it using GTK+2.0, use:

 export GDK_USE_XFT=1 

It's on by default on 2.2 onwards, and in 2.4 the core engine is no longer used by GTK+.

Note that the Xft backend is much better at producing scaled versions of the fonts. The reason is that the core X font system, when you use scalable fonts, will render the entire set of glyphs as bitmaps at the requested SIZE when you open the font (which isn't fast or a good use of memory -- it quite large for big point sizes or fonts with large coverage, such as with Asian fonts).

The original core font rendering engine in XFree86 didn't support AA fonts. However, for GTK+ 2.0 onwards, the Xft font rendering backend can be used to render antialiased fonts. To select it using GTK+2.0, use:

 export GDK_USE_XFT=1 

It's on by default on 2.2 onwards, and in 2.4 the core engine is no longer used by GTK+.

Note that the Xft backend is much better at producing scaled versions of the fonts. The reason is that the core X font system, when you use scalable fonts, will render the entire set of glyphs as bitmaps at the requested size when you open the font (which isn't fast or a good use of memory -- it quite large for big point sizes or fonts with large coverage, such as with Asian fonts).