So I finally got around to hacking freetype yesterday. All I did was modify the FIR filter weights that are used for the "lcddefault"-style filtering. Where as they use to be a [1, 4, 7, 4, 1] weighting (relative), I tried a [1, 3, 4, 3, 1]. To my eyes, it results in a lot less fringing. I can use the slight autohinter with subpixel, and get pretty good results across most fonts (even msttcorefonts). Below is a shot of Arial being used on a google search result page. This is by far the best I've seen Arial look on Linux. Ever.
