I actually have a pretty good idea of what would be involved, and I think it could be done by a third party. It would require hooking part of the GDI* API to intercept calls to paint the screen, so that it would be possible to permit alpha blending, and then rewriting the font drivers (truetype.dll, freetype.dll, pmatm.dll) to take advantage of it. Freetype.dll would be a wash; as I understand it, it would simply be a matter of uncommenting some code in the OS/2 port and poking it at the right calls. PMATM.DLL would be a lot more work... but perhaps it could be replaced with code from other sources. The other issue would be the INCREDIBLY FUCKING STUPID limit on fontnames; 31 chars is just not enough. This part would really suck because you'd have to implement a new call instead of replacing the old one, as the structure holding the font name would have to change.