Don't current versions of FreeType do antialiasing automatically? I'm thinking Tk shouldn't need to know or care about the details of font rendering. What OS, distro, and version are you running X on? What version of X?

Update: FreeType does do it, but Tk does need to be involved after all; See hannibal's better explanation below.

$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
[download]

Linux 2.4.20, Gentoo, XFree 4.3.0. I do have Freetype installed, but it doesn't seem to affect Tk. Do I have to load it as an X module or something? I don't have access to any other Linux boxen to try this on.

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If I were a terrorist I'd mainly be afraid of polar bears. Because at the moment, I'm mainly afraid of polar bears, and I can't really see why that would change.
- slashdot

in my limited understanding of how X fonts work --- I belive that the app has to be re-written to take advantage of the font-config(Freetype, etc) package, rather than the standard X11 font system.

Just having freetype and fontconfig setup doesn't automatically make apps antialiased automatically -- look at xfontsel.

If someone has altered tk to use fontconfig, then you'd be all set ...

This may or may not get anti-aliasing, but playing with this lets you try different fonts:

Perl/Tk doesn't look that bad

All code given here is UNTESTED unless otherwise stated.

Hehe - that was actually me who posted that. :) But yeah I've tried that.

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If I were a terrorist I'd mainly be afraid of polar bears. Because at the moment, I'm mainly afraid of polar bears, and I can't really see why that would change.
- slashdot

OOOPS!!!

Now that's funny.

--Bob Niederman, http://bob-n.com

All code given here is UNTESTED unless otherwise stated.

Unpack the tarball and then run "perl Makefile.PL XFT=1". Then make the module as usual. Note that before you can do this, you need freetype, fontconfig, and Xft.

Once this is done, the font "{open glyph look}" can be specified to use an antialiased font. This is all I know at the moment, but it definitely does work.