@mubertmumphrey: Yeah, that does look like what the K3 would do with an OTF (or a TrueType font with bytecode hinting instructions, and the bytecode hinter enabled, for that matter) with slightly off hinting (or hinting tweaked for other renderers...).
So, yeah, it's a bit hit & miss depending on the fonts... (You can get an idea of how it'll look like on a K3 when using FreeType on a PC, with the hinting at the highest level, the bytecode hinter enabled, and the autohinter disabled).
With a full Linux system, you can usually avoid these kind of issues, either by using the autohinter (wich was the default on a lot of distribs for a long time, because of patents issues), or by having an extensive fontconfig configuration with explicit bci/autohint blacklists for some fonts/foundries, depending on the desired size of the font. Unfortunately, on the K3, those settings are frozen (except for the browser, and even then, that might not be true, I haven't checked).
To give you an idea, my local fontconfig config file is 200 lines long... And that's just for a few specific fonts/foundries handling, most of it for the MS Core fonts
. (But I freely admit to being pretty anal about font rendering on my computer, so...
). And I usually do end up using the autohinter over bci for everything except MS fonts, both because I usually prefer how it renders fonts, and because it pretty much solves any issue a font might have because of crappy embedded hinting instructions
.
AFAIK, MS' ClearType renderer avoid some of those issues by using the hinting instructions differently, and an extended blacklist system.
No idea about Apple & Adobe's renderers, but I guess they usually do try to avoid showing things like that to the user
. (Not that familiar with those, the OS X font rendering pretty much makes me want to tear my eyes out... And again for every website embedding text rendered like that in images... For the few times I used Acrobat, Adobe's one seems pretty nice & solid).
EDIT: Attached some screens of ftview to demonstrate how settings change everything with FreeType... (first is Lucida Sans, crappy hinting, second is Consola, very specific hinting, last is DejaVu Serif, very marked hinting tailored to FT). Most of my FontConfig tinkering usually ends up in settings like in the second column (which will look like crap on a CRT screen, in case anyone still has one of those :P).