...rendering small fonts at a very good quality

Which tool is the best if you want to render (2D) TTF/OTF fonts at small sizes so that they stay crisp and sharp with a tiny antialiasing?

I know about the font settings in Photoshop CS but i need more than that so has Photoshop improved in this aspect in CS2 or CS3? Are there any differences between the win and osx versions? Any other method getting better results in photoshop - beside of doing the pixelwork on your own?

Any other paint program better in this aspect like Paint Shop Pro, Fireworks, Gimp, Pixelmator, ... or is there a tool around which is perfect for just rendering fonts?


Thanks,

taumel

My font machine editor + module has a improved anti-aliasing for rendering bitmap fonts for its use on blitzMax. The editor is windows only, but the fonts and the module can be used on windows, OsX and Linux.
More info here:
http://www.blide.org/FONTMACHINE.htm
Additionally, you can select only a sub-set of characters to be included in the bitmap font, so you can control the bitmap font size. Additionaly, the bitmap font stores all data in a compressed format for fast loading and easy portability.

I use a trick to "set to 4X and shrink to 0.25x down" from a post somewhere in the forum.

Ziggy's module is impressive too, worth a try.

I found that and used it for my project :

http://www.codehead.co.uk/cbfg/

Very easy and nice :)

I got the best automatic results so far with Pixelmator (OSX only). As i need this for gfx made out of TTF/OTF-Fonts i don't know if the Bitmap font tools are useful to me. Supersampling a.o. is something i already tried out but it comes to worse results here.

I found I got the bestcresults with supersamplingx4 or something. I don't have the free bitmap font creator app with me at the moment so can't think of the name. I used it for Fairway Solitaire. EMail if you want me to remember which one I used.

The new version of the font machine ( http://www.blide.org/FONTMACHINE.htm ) has a new rendering mode spetially designed to improve readability on small fonts, just in case anyone wants to give it a try