[ft] Fontlab, Hinting, Ubuntu and Freetype

[Pon]

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place to ask about this, so apologies
in advance. I'm starting to draw a TrueType font in Fontlab specifically for
greyscale, antialiased screen display. I'm focusing on TrueType because I'm
pretty convinced that accurate rendering at small sizes requires a good deal
of manual hinting, especially deltas. Currently I'm running Windows XP and
after experimenting with its GDI greyscale rasterizer I've determined that
it only has 4-bit transparency, ignores kerning and has some strange gamma
issues that result in poor light-on-dark rendering. This just doesn't cut it
for me, and Vista's new WPF platform seems to be basically
cleartype-oriented with greyscale support as an afterthought (it just
desaturates the colored edge pixels).

So, basically I'm interested in making the font under the assumption that it
will display in some Linux variant and be rendered by Freetype. To that end
I installed Ubuntu 7.04 onto a virtual machine and started testing it out.
I'm very impressed with how well Freetype renders even unhinted fonts.
However, the problem I'm having is that my workflow is rather torturous for
testing out my progress. I need XP because Fontlab won't run in Linux and
Fontforge only seems to support Type1 hinting. If I'm in Fontlab in XP and I
make some adjustments to the font, then to check how it renders I need to
generate the font, copy it over to the Ubuntu VM, install into the system
font folder and then open Firefox where I have some font testing HTML. To
complicate it even more it seems that sometimes I need to reboot the virtual
machine in order for Ubuntu to recognize the change in font (I guess running
fc-cache might work but that takes rather long as well).

My question, then, is whether there is some sort of Linux-compatible
Freetype application that will just load a font on-the-fly (without needing
to install it to the system font directory) and then let me display some
sample text and maybe test out hinting versus no hinting, antialiasing
versus no antialiasing, etc. Maybe there is some easier workflow that I
haven't thought of at all?
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