Taken from another thread:
One thing I think missing is to set the antialias level of text.
This is not easy and not necessarily what you really want. You can have no anti-aliasing now, just turn down the quality slider one notch, but as you'll see, the results are not at all attractive.

Since Xara uses the exact same rendering mechanism for all vector objects and fonts this provide complete consistency and accuracy - the price is that small type is often blurred when it's not on whole pixel boundaries, and not whole pixels in size.

So we have the choice. Inaccurate positioning and spacing, but clearer text, or completely accurate rendering, but blurred text at small sizes. We opt for the latter.

But granted that, for example, ClearType font rendering is great - really better than any other font rendering technology by a mile - and way better than anything Adobe manage in terms of clear crisp readability at small font sizes. But it's not even slightly accurate. Not only do fonts not look anything like their outlines, but the weight and overall 'color' as they call it, of blocks of text is all wrong as well. And the font metrics are also wrong - the letter spacing, at certain sizes, can be very wrong. You'll find for example, that at certain size a tiny increment in point size has a huge jump in text size or boldness - and all font hinting systems suffer this problem. While this is, just about, acceptable for word processing, it's certainly not, in our opinion, acceptable for general graphics purposes or anything that purports to provide accurate WYSIWYG graphics and text display.

The benefit of the Xara approach is that you can do things like 'convert to shapes'. and there is no visible change. Our outline rendering and font rendering are 100% consistent. You can, for example rotate text and it remains very high quality. Just try, for example, rotating a block of text in Xara, and then compare against other products - especially Word or anything that uses ClearType - they are a complete disaster at any angle other than horizontal.

We have looked at offering Cleartype rendering options, but the technical and usability issues of inaccurate text spacing and rendering are a very high price to pay.

Having said all that we do understand there is a need, in special cases, for better pixel optimized text for things like buttons and very small labels for web use. Where outline accuracy or rotated text is not an issue. We did cover this in the July Outsider newsletter which everyone should get http://www.xara.com/news/july06/tutorial.asp

This shows two techniques for producing better quality type at small sizes. Either by careful manual positioning of the text and text point size, or using 'pixel fonts' that have been designed specifically to be readable at small font sizes. the latter is used by Flash designers regularly to solve the same problem.

That article shows there are solutions or techniques that can be used today in Xara Xtreme that can help.