Font rendering

[c_lev]

I know there's a lot of help out there for people having trouble getting fonts to be rendered to a standard similar to windows. Most solutions come down to one thing - enabling the bytecode interpreter function of freetype. I followed the instructions here to do this (and also tried installing a pre-compiled version of BCI freetype).

This is a screen shot after enabling bytecode interpreter, MS fonts installed and sub-pixel smoothing (doesnt make much difference on or off).



In particular note the "W"s in the search box and how the large block of text on the right is rendered. Surely freetype is capable of rendering fonts better than this?

My hard/software:
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
Iiyama ProLite E431S 17" LCD
FC5 i386

Any suggestions? I'm desperate to figure out a solution to this problem, its the single problem stopping me from dropping Windows completely! Thanks in advance.

[markjensen]

Do you have the MS TrueType 'core fonts' installed? Without looking deeper into this, that could be the problem, as web pages often specify the MS font, then have generic alternatives. If you don't have "Arial" installed, for example, the next font specified is default system "sans-serif", which may look ugly.

[c_lev]

Yes i do have MS core fonts installed. As downloaded from here.