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And don't forget about sub-pixel rendering (which is what tools like Cleartype do) which adjusts the red,green and blue values individually using actual sorcery:
You could totally geek-out on this stuff: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/24/a-closer-look-at-font-rendering/
bq
Font shapes are defined using vectors, so they always look awesome when you make them bigger.
When you don't have enough pixels to draw the proper shapes, hinting is what makes sure that each stroke is visible, tells it where a bit of grey might make black-on-white more readable, or nudge a stroke out of position a little to align it to the pixel grid.