I find that TrueType BCI produce better looking font than Freetype auto hinter (especially at small size), but I can't get it to work on my box. I have followed the wiki and built freetype with bindist flag disabled (checked with equery), added this line <edit name="autohint" mode="assign"><bool>false</bool></edit> to ~/.fonts.conf , this is the content of my .Xdefaults file:

Xft.autohint: false Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault Xft.hintstyle: hintslight Xft.hinting: true Xft.antialias: rgba Xft.dpi: 98 Xft.rgba: rgb

According to the wiki, if BCI is used, then GNOME font configuration hint setting won't have any effect (light, medium, heavy will all look the same) but it is still effective in my case :(