On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine
In UI (gtk+ applications, for instance) a DejaVu Sans 10pt looks very much different.
It's not AA, it's hinting. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/170392. Inkscape does not do hinting because with its freedom of zoom, it would basically mean you're getting a different picture depending on zoom, which is not a good thing. In any case, the rendering architecture always outputs letters as shapes, and this would be quite hard to change, cairo or no cairo.
BTW Xara has the same "problem". Though personally I always considered it more of a benefit: I like the fact that we treat everything the same, and that when zoomed out, the page with text looks very much like a paper page viewed from afar, without the distortions of hinting that try to make it still readable at any cost.