The move to better subpixel rendering in X windows continues. Tobias Wolf kindly pointed out to me these new patches from David Turner. Turner says "it's rather delicious" and I'm inclined to agree.

Applied to libXft and Cairo, they remove a lot of the ugly colour fringing from subpixel rendered fonts under Linux.

David posts a screenshot, which looks great on my screen (if you have a CRT or different pixel ordering, it may look horrible for you -- the disadvantage of subpixel and screenshots!)

Update: Tobias mentions another patch, which is needed to get best results.

Further update: Diego Escalante Urrelo has posted some Ubuntu packages with the patches in.