There doesn't appear to be any existing place in the docs for "hints and tips", but here's some things that I found out through trial and error:
sam lets you configure a font for drawing text, and a colour to draw it with. However, due to the way sam draws selected text, you should set the foreground colour to black OR use a font without anti-aliasing. If you don't do at least one of those, selected text will be rainbow gibberish.
If you're using a scalable font, you can force sam to draw it without anti-aliasing by adding :antialias=0 to the end of the font pattern: font Envy Code R:size=10:antialias=0
If the font you want to use looks terrible without anti-aliasing because it does not include rasterization hints, applying FreeType's autohinter by adding :autohint=1 may help.
If you're using a bitmap-based font, it may include a separate copy limited to Latin1 (ISO8859-1) encoding for legacy applications. Because sam doesn't do glyph scavenging, it's better to use a font with as many glyphs as possible. There's no FontConfig syntax for "give me a font in Unicode", but apparently "give me a font that supports Afrikaans" is enough to nudge it toward a Unicode font: :lang=af
If you can't find a suitable place for these tips, feel free to just close this issue.
There doesn't appear to be any existing place in the docs for "hints and tips", but here's some things that I found out through trial and error:
:antialias=0to the end of the font pattern:font Envy Code R:size=10:antialias=0:autohint=1may help.:lang=afIf you can't find a suitable place for these tips, feel free to just close this issue.