There are a couple of resources describing how to get Emacs 23 (aka “the unicode branch”) display antialiased fonts (see here for starters).

So building on my previous post on installing Emacs 23 from CVS you need to use this configure command:

./configure --prefix=/home/theBlackDragon/local --program-suffix=.emacs-23 --with-gtk --enable-font-backend --with-xft --with-freetype

You’ll need to start it like this for example:

emacs-23 --enable-font-backend --font "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono-12"

You can use an Xresource for the font if you like, but the –enable-font-backend switch is mandatory.