Fonts on Windows are drawn by GTK+ using the native win32 calls; therefore, you need to have font smoothing enabled in Windows itself. Note that Windows will not smooth fonts within certain point sizes (6pt - 10pt for most fonts) unless you are using Windows XP.

On versions other than WinXP, you can enable font smoothing on Windows by following these steps:

• Right-click on the desktop, select Properties to get the Display Properties dialog.
• Choose the Effects tab.
• Look for an option that mentions font smoothing, or smooth edges and enable it.

And on Windows XP:

• Right-click on the desktop, select Properties to get the Display Properties dialog.
• Choose the Appearance tab and click on the Effects button.
• Enable "Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts".
• From the combo box, choose "Standard" to get the same font smoothing that older versions of Window use, or "ClearType" to get smoothing of all fonts.
• There is a web page for configuring ClearType (IE only): [www.microsoft.com]

Note that GTK and Pango do not use Xft on Windows, so the GDK_USE_XFT flag doesn't have any meaning there.

(James and Tim Evans)