well, i thought this was excellent. sorry it didn't get more votes - thanks for posting it.
[edit: ha! i changed a setting while reading that, then forgot. i just rebooted to fix a hardware issue and - wow - this looks way better! all i did was reduce the amount of hinting used by kde. until i read that article i had assumed more was better. also, my comment now makes no sense, sorry - i made that when it appeared to be slipping off the "new" page with just 2 votes (but i see somehow it arrived on the front page...).]
You're welcome. I found this article while looking for a credible source that could explain the fonts.conf settings, as most of the information about that on the web is either plain wrong, or just lacking any kind of justification.
It will be nice when the technology advances to make full size computer screens with >300dpi screens like the iPhone4. Pixels and heavy font tricks will likely be a relic of the past.
While there is a clear trend towards high-resolution screens (for example see [1] below), higher PPI requires more power, and so should not ideally be used for all applications.
Actually we were there several years ago -- do a search on the IBM T221 monitor. I think they were about $15,000 or so, and they only made them for a couple of years. I imagine it's pretty awkward to use one in Windows, since so many UI elements don't scale in any sensible way.
Clearly resolution independent windowing & UI widgets are also a prerequisite, and as this would likely require most existing applications to be extensively modified I don't see either Apple or Microsoft rushing to get it done.
According to a Wikipedia article[1] Microsoft did a good job when it comes to resolution independence, and Apple also makes progress on that front.
"Microsoft Windows has supported DPI aware programs since Windows Vista and allows user specified DPI settings for the windowing interface. [...] The Windows Presentation Foundation from Microsoft, and consequently, WPF applications, are also designed to be resolution-independent."
"Apple has included some support for resolution independence in recent versions of Mac OS X, which can be demonstrated with the developer tools Quartz Debug, which includes a feature which allows the user to scale the interface."
edit: sorry i missed skittlebrau's mention of this, regardless, maxim has a lot of interesting articles on his site if you are interested in geometry rasterization
AGG really pushed the envelope, it's a shame that Maxim has seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. Cairo has a different focus and I wonder if it will ever get to the same level of control and performance, given that it tries to target many different backends.
Apparently the Google Web Font team have been doing something to make the unhinted, open source fonts they provide display better on Windows machines, though I've not seen anywhere that they detail exactly what they do.
Probably something quite clever since the same team actually removes the hint info for platforms that don't use it to save download time.
[edit: ha! i changed a setting while reading that, then forgot. i just rebooted to fix a hardware issue and - wow - this looks way better! all i did was reduce the amount of hinting used by kde. until i read that article i had assumed more was better. also, my comment now makes no sense, sorry - i made that when it appeared to be slipping off the "new" page with just 2 votes (but i see somehow it arrived on the front page...).]