font smoothing

[toyfactory]

Hi!

Gnome's font smoothing is beautiful with Roman characters but dreadful
with Japanese text.  Some people on this list experienced it a couple of
months ago when I posted messages using a Japanese character-set.  Even
the Roman characters in the Japanese fonts appear fuzzy and badly
dithered.  The fine detail on the Japanese (Chinese) characters is
usually blurred out.

See: http://toyfactory.xsmail.com/temp/gnome(smooth1).png

If I change the font rendering setting to monochrome (i.e. disable the
smoothing) I end up with legible Japanese text but elsewhere in Gnome
the Roman text looks very lumpy.

See: http://toyfactory.xsmail.com/temp/gnome(smooth0).png

And just for reference, here's what it looks like in Windows.  There's
no smoothing so the characters are legible, and of course the Roman
characters look fine as well.

See: http://toyfactory.xsmail.com/temp/windows.png

My (possibly incorrect) understanding is the the hinting information
used to render text nicely is not open source and therefore can't be
used by Gnome.  Gnome gets around this problem by using some sort of
anti-aliasing to smooth out the lumpy edges.  Now, is it possible to
selectively enable the smoothing for Roman text and disable the
smoothing for Japanese text?

Alternatively, is there any other way to achieve legible Japanese text
and smooth Roman text in Gnome?

Thanks for your help,

Nick