I have a favourite font¹ that for historical reasons renders — at 12 points / 96 DPI — in a 7×16 pixel character matrix. From 12 points through 23 points it distorts badly.²
On my current monitor 7×16 is too small and 14×32 too large.
And for a moment I thought: what about subpixel mode? I have it turned off in favor of greyscale antialiasing, because I don’t like colour-fringing, but it does deal in fractional pixels. Maybe it could give me some usable intermediate physical sizes?
Answer: no, not quite, not at 96 DPI; it yields vertically (!) malformed characters at 16 points.
But there is a way to get that happy more-or-less-medium size: change the screen DPI to the monitor’s correct value of 109 and lo! Plain greyscale antialiasing delivers the illusion of pixel-perfect reasonably-sized characters at 16 points. Switching to subpixel mode gains nothing but a color-fringed insert cursor. Slightly counterproductive, probably slower.
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¹ “PR Number 3“, a replica of the Apple II character-generator font.
² The basic matrix of the A2CGF is 7×8, which in eighty-column mode was/is sent to the monitor at double the normal horizontal pixel-clock rate, producing half-width pixels. 3.5×8 → 7×16.