Am I the only one who dislikes OSX Font Smoothing?

I'm a recent OSX/Mac switcher and I'm having a tough time getting used to the OSX style of font switching. So much in fact that I have used "TinkerTool" to disable it, which takes care of about 80% of the smoothing. There still are a few web pages that smooth the fonts, and the finder menu items are still smoothed, but over all it does the job.

But my question to all of you is, should I take the time and try and get used to the anti-aliasing? What setting do you guys use(Automatic, medium, light etc).

/Frustrated

Jeff

 

I am totally with you on this one. Fonts and websurfing look much better in Windows. I am so annoyed about this issue that I use my MBP almost 100% in Windows. What is tinkertool?

 

Have you tried this command line in OSX?

sudo defaults write CoreGraphics CGFontDisableAntialiasing YES

I've heard that it might fix the aliasing.

Jeff

 

But leopard is such a better OS! Have you tried tinkertool at all? I've found that setting the anti-aliasing threshold works pretty well. At least the web pages look a lot better.

Jeff

 

It bothered me at first but now I hardly notice it. Give it a little time, you will get used to it.

 

if it's the same effect that's observed in Safari for windows then yeah it makes everything seem blurry.

 

You could try tweaking the font smoothing style in System Prefs>Appearance. For me, setting it on Strong makes everything look best.

 

personally I find the text to be very sharp on my MBP

 

I don't have a problem with it. Of course I have horrible eyesight too!

 

I think it is slightly annoying at times the font smoothing. I turned my panel to "light" and have it stop anti-aliasing at 10pt.

Is it just me or does the text in Firefox 3.0 look sharper than in Safari?

 

Personally, I can't stand the font smoothing for long turn use. To me it just makes everything seem so very "unsharp" which is definitely not what I would expect from a modern laptop.

But to each their own....

 

to the OP, this topic is one my pet-subjects. If you do a google search on this, you will seea number of articles discussiong in some detail. One common theme, and you will notice a few people here who use Mac OS X will say the same thing, is that Mac OS X font rendering, has its benefits, such as advantages that fonts do not distort with scaling (i.e. what you see on screen is exactly what will appear on a large print poster--this is my simplistic understanding of the concept). Secondly, OS X users will also tell you that the more you use it the easier it gets---you get conditioned.

I use Vista/XP and Ubuntu: Vista font rendering is another story; it also has blurry fonts and broken (unsharp) fonts, but MS will stick to its guns and maintain it is very soothing to the eyes. In XP, one can turn on the ClearType to make it 'easier' to see text on an LCD screen. My experience has been with Windows Vista to switch to Classic theme and I get all me crispy fonts back; In Xp, I do not use cleartype. Ubuntu, uses Sans/Sans Serif as default fonts with smoothing as default., but agian falls short of the windows classic theme/and fonts. So I disable anti-aliasing altogether in Ubuntu, and use one of MS corefonts (Tahoma esp) as my default system wide font--all fonts become crisp and apealing to the eye.

When I tried OS X in our library, Applications>Preferences does not have an option to turn anti-aliasing off altogether, and I am not sure of one could install MS TTfonts in OS X.--but I see someone has posted a workaround in command line, that I will try and see if it works.
I thought I would post this blog with a screen shot which for me clearly shows what the OP is saying. The blog text are clear and sharp, but the OS X finder screenshot to mee seems vry blurry.

just my 2 c.

S

EDIT: Oh, BTW, this is tinker tool

 

When I started using a Macbook, I was really disheartened by the fonts. They looked blurry and awful. What I've found is that over time, I've gotten used to them. It took a while, but now I have to look for the partial pixels to see them. I still use Windows a lot, and using my Macbook is more like having all the text in bold than like looking at something out of focus.

Give it a couple weeks, and you'll probably get used to it.

 

Maybe its just me...I find the way OS X renders its font looks horrible on a PC, but looks fine on a Mac. Like I have absolutely no problem when using my MacBook, but if I take a screenshot and view the image on a Windows computer, the text looks horrible .

 

Hey, Sam, that proly explains it. Also if I may add, the better the screen resolution, the better the fonts look on a Mac (with OS X). BTW, using bootcamp, how to do the fonts render in XP or Vista (are they identifcal to a PC running XP/Vista?

S

 

It ought to look identical, unless the monitor is of a different type, or of a different pixel density. Perhaps your PC's got a lot bigger monitor relative to its resolution?

 

No, I think its just more of a "comparison" kind of thing for me. If I'm just using my MacBook, then all the font rendering is OS X-style, but if I look at a screenshot of text on a Windows PC, it'll look awkward as it looks different compared to the Windows text.