Use it at your own risk.
Antialiased text means that fonts have 'soft' edges and blend into their backgrounds smoothly.
Antialiased fonts are useful because the look a lot better than non-antialiased fonts, expecially at low resolutions. One day I saw some code that Domenic Cooney had put on his web page to draw antialiased text. He used transparant pixels to draw the antialiasing and I really liked what I saw. I took his code and made some optimizations and re-wrote a lot of it. I also found the Freetype Project on the net which is simple ansi C code for loading True Type Font files into memory.