Way back, like last year, I hacked our Unix graphics side to use
t1lib for fonts. It was slow even without anti-aliasing. Very slow.
Very, very slow. ;)
I talked a bit with the author of the library, and his opinion was
basically "client-side fonts will always be really slow when you're
doing as much drawing as a word processor does." X just can't
push pixels between the client and the server that fast. Normal
Type 1 scaling and rasterization occurs in the server, and things
are pretty snappy.
X also caches fonts for you, on the server side, which I wasn't
originally doing with t1lib. But plotting one character was
just really slow.
I think FreeType is the TrueType library which USED to be GPLed,
but is now some mutant incompatible custom BSD license.
-- Shaw Terwilliger