Why are my fonts so jagged?

[Mistrel]

I'm trying to convert the Hiragana lettering from a Wikipedia article to a TTF for use on my mobile device. Everything is working fine but I don't understand why some of the angles are so jagged.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

Turn off image smoothing to get sharp corners. That image is a bit small, but should be just good enough. See this thread from a few days ago.

[Mistrel]

Sorry, my question wasn't very clear. I meant to ask why the glyph is so pixelated. Some of the angles in the lettering look as if there is no clear type smoothing at all.

It only seems to be a problem with horizontal shapes. Vertical shapes don't exhibit this problem.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

That is because there is no hinting. See the FAQ at the top of the support forum.

[Dave Crosby]

Did you turn on grayscaling?

[JohnK]

I noticed I have the same problem with a custom font as well -- the vertical lines appear to have a smooth greyscale (I just call it antialias) where as angles close to the horizontal have clear on/off without antialias.

I have the greyscale rendering and gridfitting turned on up to 65535 (doesn't seem to change if the limit is lowered to 14). Shouldn't this work equally in both near vertical and near horizontal angles? Why just near horizontal.

Also is gridfitting the same as hinting? The terms are a bit confusing.