The text tool options dialog also has a checkbox for disabling anti-aliasing entirely, so that every pixel of the text is either fully opaque or fully transparent. This is particularly true for fonts with aggressive hinting at at small sizes - with the auto-hinter, the changes are usually less pronounced. Note that, with hinting enabled, changing the font size by even a small amount can have a major effect on the appearance of the text. The custom-hinted version, however, looks very different, with most line widths adjusted to be exactly one pixel wide. In this particular case, the auto-hinter doesn't change the appearance much, although if you compare it side-to-side with the unhinted version, you can see some sharpening.

Either hinting method should make the text look sharper, but the results of the two methods can be quite different, as shown below (normal hinting on left, auto-hinter on right): There's also another checkbox, 'Force auto-hinter', which controls the actual hinting method GIMP will use: with the box unchecked, GIMP will follow any custom hinting instructions embedded in the font, whereas checking the box makes GIMP use only its own generic font-independent hinting algorithm. (It's enabled by default, but you might have disabled it.) You can enable hinting in GIMP by clicking the text layer, selecting the text tool and checking the 'Hinting' checkbox in the tool options. Hinting is a method of adjusting the shapes of characters so that their edges better align with pixel boundaries. This already looks pretty sharp to me, but here are a few things you could do to make it even sharper: 1. But first, just to set a baseline, here's some ordinary text in the GIMP (16px Sans, antialiased, no hinting, scaled up 2x): It's somewhat unclear what you mean by the text being 'not sharp', so I'll give a variety of possible suggestions below.

Can you use extensis fonts in gimp