[Qgis-developer] Fonts in map composer

[John C. Tull]

Marco,

First, thanks for all the wonderful improvements to the map composer.  
This is now quite stable and usable for production quality maps.

One of the last remaining issues is the quality of fonts in printed  
maps. Here ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/67875808@N00/2979503270/ )  
are sample outputs using qgis and mapserver. Note the fonts and buffer  
are antialiased in mapserver (right), but not in qgis (left). This  
makes labels for small font sizes quite unattractive. Also, note that  
the characters are not spaced evenly.

Is there a way to have antialiasing available for all font sizes? (Is  
there a cutoff size for antialiased fonts?) Both maps use Arial, a  
standard TrueType font on my system (Mac OS X). I had to select font  
size 8 in qgis (yet it is still too large); mapserver is using a  
larger size (font size 12). I tried with a larger canvas and larger  
fonts, but things did not improve a great deal and the file size and  
computation time grew considerably.

If you have any insights or ideas on this, I'd love to hear them.

Cheers,
John