I used to hand anti-alias pixel fonts. There was a tool called Grasp that our shop used to create animated ads back in the early 90's. It only supported two color pixel fonts.

Wrote a tool to take a single font sheet bitmap and parse out each letter. Each letter had 4 shades of grey. So, would create 4 fonts that would render in 4 passes.

To make a master bitmap, we'd scan a font sheet into a PCX file hand it over to an artist with the instructions: "make it smooth". Hours upon hours of: zoom-in-click-click-click-zoom-out-review-repeat. Poor artist.

I wonder what kind of lament a vector artist will have, decades from now. And what will take its place.

[edit] vector