It's a bit sad to see such a beautiful bitmaps blurred to death by clueless "antialiasing". Doesn't anybody appreciate clean bitmap fonts anymore? I feel like an old man yelling at passerby.
I use bitmap fonts as much as possible and I turn AA off for all fonts below a certain size (18 px IIRC). I also force Firefox to exclusively use Arial because of the excellent hinting.
Things are so much more legible and crisp it's not even funny.
(Edit: Funny thing is, I remember font smoothing as much better in general maybe 10-15 years ago. Perhaps it was just the novelty that appealed to me then.)
I find the rendering on Linux (KDE Neon and openSUSE for me) to be vastly superior to Windows 10. It was already very good on my old 27" ~108ppi display, but it's even better now that I have a 4K display that's ~163ppi, which I run at 150% scale. Crisp shapes, no blurring at all.
It's all at default settings, subpixel rendering on and slight hinting.
Can you point me to some docs about how this can be done?
https://freetype.org/patents.html
Make sure you don't have this in your fontconfig:
<match target="font">
<edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
And the pixels will still be invisible to the naked eye. It'll make no difference.
Pixel-perfect fonts are great when you have 8-16 scanlines to define a character. It hasn't been like that for decades.
I used Cool Retro Term on Linux as my terminal in full screen when debugging stuff because the task was so boring that using an interesting terminal made it bearable.
That's the basic tenet of bitmap fonts. You are not supposed to place them at sub-pixel positions, or to rescale them.
The visual effect of bad antialiasing is horrific, no matter the resolution of the screen. Even if your pixels are tiny, you readily notice if all the pixels are black and white only, or instead there are a few ugly "gray" pixels in between.
You're not alone but we are a dying breed.