Here is a comparison between the libtcod 1.3.2 terminal font and the libtcod 1.4 new antialiased font. At scale 1, the difference is barely noticeable, but when the game is run in full screen, the AA font looks much better.
The AA font look also much better even in windowed modes when we use a 10x10 or 12x12 font instead of the standard 8x8.
Even with characters as small as 10x10, the alpha channel allows to have a very good readability even with more stylized fonts, like this example using an awesome font courtesy of Mingos.