At the moment java font rasterizer only supports hinting for Truetype fonts.
However, Type1 fonts are commonplace on Solaris/Linux platforms and they
often look not very good without hinting.

To reproduce one may use following test
(cour.pfa font is required, results are saved to new.png file):

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.image.*;
import javax.imageio.*;

public class Visual {

 private static void tryFont(String fontFile, String testStr, float sz1, float sz2) {
  try {
    System.err.println("Testing "+fontFile);

    Font f = Font.createFont(Font.TYPE1_FONT, new FileInputStream(fontFile));

    BufferedImage bi = new BufferedImage(1000, 400, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
    Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D) bi.getGraphics();
    g2.setColor(Color.WHITE);
    g2.setFont(f);

    int off = 10;

    for(float sz=sz1; sz < sz2; sz+=1.0) {
      off += (int) sz+5;
      f = f.deriveFont(Font.PLAIN, sz);
      g2.setFont(f);
      g2.drawString(""+sz+" "+testStr, 10, off);
    }

    ImageIO.write(bi, "png", new File("new.png"));
    
    System.err.println("Test done");
   } catch (Exception e) {
     System.err.println("Failed to test "+fontFile+" because of " + e);
   }
 }

 public static void main(String[] args) {
     tryFont("cour.pfa", "0123456789 abcdefghijklmnopqrstxyz ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTXYZ !\"()[]/\\%$#@^&*-+=_", 7, 20);
 }
}