Greetings,
All of you were
so close - which is
not to say any of you were wrong.
The
actual cause is font
hinting. In most cases you can achieve near
identical results
inspite of the differences in Type engines. A
long time
ago, I ran into some issues with font rendering on my display (X11). So I "dug in"
to discover why my newly acquired hi-end equipment rendered such crappy looking
fonts! Well, after quite a lot of research and development, I
finally had good
looking fonts - and a very intimate understanding of fonts (typesetting), their history,
Display management (X11, Windows, etc...), and more. Because I felt
others might
also
be suffering the same problem, and
not have the resources to do the "detective work"
that I did. I wrote an article:
http://hosting.1command.com/faq/X11/X11-AAfonts.phtml on it.
PLEASE NOTE:
My server farm runs on the BSD family of Operating Systems. But, as at the time
I wrote the article, Linux was more popular, it is more geared to Linux users.
To a moderately capable SysAdmin the translation should be trivial.

ALSO. Please note the site is in a "holding pattern". As such, some of it doesn't work.
Reason being; I
currently own/host/maintain 200+ domains. As such, I needed
a
decent CMS, or management system. It's
way too daunting a
task to manage all the code to maintain them by hand. So, I set out to first
evaluate all the possibilities available, before "re-inventing the wheel". 361 evaluations
later, I've adopted 5 (projects were abandoned), and decided to write my own.
So the site listed above is using a CMS I
do not care for, but was easy to
layup as an interim "holding pattern" while I complete my CMS. Sorry. :S
HTH!
--Chuck
P.S. If you should have any questions, feel free to give me a shout!
P.P.S. In short, in order to achieve your desired results, you'll have to
use different font directories/folders - one for each OS. So that they can
properly "hint" for their font
unique rendering system/libraries.