Does X11 support anti-aliased text ?
The X11 protocol does not support anti-aliased text, and modifying it to do that would be difficult. This is due to the fact that the standard X11 rendering model is only capable of performing logical operations (like AND/XOR/OR/NOT) on pixel values, while arithmetic ones (ADD/SUB/MUL) are needed to implement anti-aliased text, as well as translucency, correctly. The “Render” XFree86 extension was created to add this type of capabilities to the X11 Server. While the extension isn’t finished yet, it’s still sufficiently workable to allow anti-aliased text to be displayed, as long as the applications or toolkits do not use the standard X11 text calls but something different !!. The only way for a legacy application to display anti-aliased text through standard X11 calls is to have a “hacked” X11 Server that performs text drawing operations differently. See this page for an example. Such technique is non standard-conformant and even likely to break certain (rare) applications however.
