No, I mean zero smearing with/without anti-aliasing and pixel-perfect versions of the font that fit exactly into the raster. This is certainly a subjective matter, so it's moot to discuss why I fall into the crowd that finds pixel-perfect bitmap monospace fonts most pleasing. Thought it's telling if you see that even Mac users sometimes prefer misc-fixed: https://monkey.org/~marius/beautiful-fixed-width-fonts-for-o...

>No, I mean zero smearing with/without anti-aliasing and pixel-perfect versions of the font that fit exactly into the raster.

I feel like this is not an issue with hi-dpi displays anymore (plus sub-pixel antialiasing and other niceties).

I can't verify that, but it's kinda unfortunate that to have clear text rendering we have to process a much larger number of pixels, though it may be the logical solution. I hope you're right.

I think it's inevitable as per the laws of physics/optics/etc -- as long as fonts have curves, to have them render clear we need to process a much larger number of pixels.

I guess it's comes from information theory (Shannon/Nyquist etc).