Women in Technology

Article:		Ten Things I Dig About Panther
Subject:		Mac OS X Font rendering - phenomenal? Hardly!
Date:		2003-10-19 14:01:35
From:		anonymous2
I have a VERY different opinion about the way Quartz renders fonts. Quite frankly it's a fuzzy eyesore. I STILL think that most fonts looked better and were less strain on the eyes under Mac OS 9.x. Yes, routinely turn off font smoothing (in the System Preferences > General menu, for fonts size 12 and smaller but I'd like to be able to do it for even larger ones. As it is, I can't hack text for more than 2 or 3 hours at a stretch, but I routinely need to make a full day of it. Thankfully my employer still uses that "other" operating system. I suspect that Apple could make text anti-aliasing an option for fonts of ANY size. So why impose its "experts'" value judgements on the rest of us. If some of us are just weird, so be it!

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

• Mac OS X Font rendering - phenomenal? Hardly!
  2003-11-13 00:15:33  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  not being able to turn off anti aliasing is stupid. i am a designer and i need to a screenshot of a user interface with the text aliased... but that is impossible. sometimes i wonder if the people at apple use their damn operating system.

• Mac OS X Font rendering can be crappy too!
  2003-11-04 19:03:09  anonymous2 [View]
  
  
  I know I'm replying to a message that is a couple weeks old, but no one mentioned Tinkertool. I'm surprised you haven't discovered it. Tinkertool allows you to turn off anti-aliasing. It even (used to ?) lets you turn off font smoothing in Cocoa programs.
  
  I think it's silly to talk about how much better some "other" system's crappy fonts are before doing some simple web research. OS X fonts can look just as crappy, if not crappier--if that's what you want.
  
  Doug

• Mac OS X Font rendering - phenomenal? Hardly!
  2003-10-20 20:44:54  James Duncan Davidson | [View]
  
  
  Definitly a case of different strokes for different folks. I hate looking at not anti-aliased fonts. Turning off font smoothing is one thing that can be done. Another is to tweak the Font Smoothing Style so that you can control the algorithm a bit.
  
  One thing you might try is to tweak your defaults. Try:
  
  defaults write -g AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 128
  
  where 128 is the point size you want. Log out and back in (a required step) and you should have non aliased fonts.