GIMP is just astoundingly bad in this area as well. The hinting is bad looking enough that you have to disable it, and when you enable anti-aliasing (required f

GIMP is just astoundingly bad in this area as well. The hinting is bad looking enough that you have to disable it, and when you enable anti-aliasing (required for decent looking fonts) it enables sub-pixel anti-aliasing too, which already doesn't make much sense since the results are so completely different on different LCD screens, but it's implemented in a retina-searingly bad fashion. I don't know why they don't just use the standard FreeType rendering, which looks fine on my system. So to get decent looking fonts in GIMP, I have to do this: 1. Render the fonts into a layer with 3x the final resolution, hinting disabled, and anti-aliasing enabled. 2. Use the desaturation filter to get rid of the terrible colorful pixels created by the anti-aliasing. 3. Scale the layer back down 3x to the final size I wanted. The fact that this works proves there's no inherent reason why GIMP couldn't have good font rendering, but it's been a mess for as long as I can remember.