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Font Smoothing — Good, bad, or just plain ugly
Mac OS X has some undesirable behavior for font smoothing which can dramatically affect how text reads on screen, depending on your particular monitor.
This effect can drive some people batty, as I learned from a reader of this site.
Changing the font smoothing setting
Open the control panel and experiment with the settings. The best setting will depend on your monitor, and your own personal preferences.
The effect does not take effect immediately; you must quit and restart a program to see the difference.
I recommend using Safari to view differences. The effect is most striking on pages that use light text on a dark background (view the blog page at diglloyd.com).
The effect can be quite pronounced on both appearance of the letters as well as the size and spacing. Here the only difference is using “12 point or smaller” versus “8 point or smaller”:
Examples
Here are samples of various font smoothing settings from my Mac Pro and the NEC 30" LCD 3090WQXi (an outstanding monitor).
It appears that is the same as . Both are awful, but the ugliest one is .
Only the setting provides results that don’t give me a headache. The effect is more obvious and more/less annoying when viewing an entire page (vs the limited size crops shown here).
Conclusions
You might be able to upgrade your Mac just by changing a setting, making it more pleasant to use every day!
