Font smoothing, font sizing, sub-pixel tuning, OS X vs Windows

I have a query regarding font the font smoothing implementation in OS X.
Having just come from the Windows world (using ClearType) naturally comparisons will be made. I am trying to get fonts looking as readable as possible on my Mac. I have 19" LCD connected via DVI so would expect no issues there. It seems difficult to get fonts looking... crisp. I am starting from the basis of using font smoothing across the board as recommended. Turn off smoothing is set to font size 8 or smaller.
I note with respect to tuning of font smoothing (anti-aliasing) that there is not a 'fine tuning' tool like as made available on Windows...
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/Step1.aspx
for the Mac. At least I can't find anything Googling. And I am not thinking of TinkerTool as that is not a fine tuner. The Windows ClearType tuner can really make a noticeable difference by adjusting the sub-pixel tuning. Is there any equivalent tool/configuration option available for Macs?

You must have extremely good vision to be able to
tell the enhacement made by ClearType on XGA or
better displays. I wish my eyesight is as good as
yours.
Well by your own admission you must be half blind, and I think you must be if you can't see the difference between - and let's be precise about this - no anti-aliasing vs. anti-aliasing +- sub-pixel rendering. Whether on Windows and/or OS X. There is.
Subpixel rendering is a trick used when resolution of
displays are challenged and small font readability is
crucial.
Today, the only place this makes sense is on
cell phones when you are trying to render small type
like a webpage.
I believe the website links I posted show that I have a reasonable grasp of what sub-pixel rendering is, that was not the purpose of my question. Also, actually, you are incorrect when you state that sub-pixel rendering is relevant/necessary only for small fonts. The exact opposite is true - usually sub-pixel rendering (including in OS X) is turned off for small fonts because it tends to make them more unreadable.
On desktop displays today at XGA or greater resolution,
the tradeoff in enhancing a bit in resolution is
outweighed by the added computation cycles needed to
filter the entire display so the eye sees "grey" on
average rather than red or green or blue.
Well you better rush and tell Apple to rip it out of OS X... because they seem to disagree with you as both anti-aliasing and sub-pixel rendering are included, and encouraged to be used, in OS X!
I'm sorry, but your statements are just plainly wrong and unconsidered.
Back to my - still unanswered, factual and valid question. The implementation of anti-aliasing + sub-pixel rendering in OS X does not appear, and I am stating this unbiasedly, to be as good as it could be (as I have seen in Windows). BTW this is not solely my finding as a number of very experienced Mac users have pointed out:
Here...
http://www.michelf.com/weblog/2006/subpixel-antialiasing-achilles-heel/
and here...
http://www.betalogue.com/2006/01/24/pages-20-does-not-fix-font-smoothing-issue/
and here...
http://mjtsai.com/blog/2006/02/04/font-smoothing-in-pages/
I gather from the replies I have received thus far, and from research on the Internet, that there is currently no way - going into Unix config files or by some utility - to address this issue. Hopefully it will be improved in a later version of OS X.
BTW - this does not stop me loving my new Mac!

Similar Messages

Bold fonts on certain websites - font smoothing woes

Hi,
I purchased a 13" MacBook Pro last week and I'm having a bit of an issue regarding font smoothing/font rendering on certain websites. I'll do my best to try and explain...
When loading certain websites (mainly vBulletin-based forums, but this happens on quite a few other sites too) the text looks bold and ugly, the same sites look fine on my friends 15" MacBook Pro and 24" iMac - as an example, his looks like the sample on the left and mine looks like the sample on the right:
http://i47.tinypic.com/e7b8ro.jpg (not my screenshot, but my issue is exactly the same)
I've done some searching and other people have fixed this problem using the following command:
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 3
This basically changes the hidden font smoothing settings which were removed in 10.6, in 10.5 you had the following options to choose from:
Automatic - Best for Main Display
Standard - Best for CRT (1)
Light (2)
Medium - Best for Flat Panel (3)
Strong (4)
If I set the command above to 1, 2 or 3 my fonts don't change at all and still look bold and horrible. If I set the command to "4" (Strong), do the usual log out and back in, then I get the correct looking fonts on the websites I had issues with BUT my system fonts and other websites now have a very soft, almost out of focus font, probably due to this being the Strong smoothing setting. Likewise if I set the command to "0" (turning font smoothing off) I get the correct looking fonts on the problematic websites but again system fonts look odd, not nice and smooth (due to font smoothing being turned off)
Does anyone have a suggestion as to what I can try next please? Could this be down to the resolution/DPI of the 13" MBP's screen?
Thanks,
Verta

Hey! I had exactly the same issue as you! Do you have an addon called WebSecurityKeeper installed into your Firefox, without your permission? Check your Addons list pls. I had this addon and when I uninstalled it, my fonts in Firefox returned to normal.
Its possibly a malicious addon. But I am not sure. I have no idea how it got installed my computer.

Bold fonts on certain websites - font smoothing gone wild?

Hi,
I purchased a 13" MacBook Pro last week and I'm having a bit of an issue regarding font smoothing/font rendering on certain websites. I'll do my best to try and explain...
When loading certain websites (mainly vBulletin-based forums, but this happens on quite a few other sites too) the text looks bold and ugly, the same sites look fine on my friends 15" MacBook Pro and 24" iMac - as an example, his looks like the sample on the left and mine looks like the sample on the right:
http://i47.tinypic.com/e7b8ro.jpg (not my screenshot, but my issue is exactly the same)
I've done some searching and other people have fixed this problem using the following command:
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 3
This basically changes the hidden font smoothing settings which were removed in 10.6, in 10.5 you had the following options to choose from:
Automatic - Best for Main Display
Standard - Best for CRT (1)
Light (2)
Medium - Best for Flat Panel (3)
Strong (4)
If I set the command above to 1, 2 or 3 my fonts don't change at all and still look bold and horrible. If I set the command to "4" (Strong), do the usual log out and back in, then I get the correct looking fonts on the websites I had issues with BUT my system fonts and other websites now have a very soft, almost out of focus font, probably due to this being the Strong smoothing setting. Likewise if I set the command to "0" (turning font smoothing off) I get the correct looking fonts on the problematic websites but again system fonts look odd, not nice and smooth (due to font smoothing being turned off)
Does anyone have a suggestion as to what I can try next please? Could this be down to the resolution/DPI of the 13" MBP's screen?
Thanks,
Verta
Message was edited by: Verta

Hey! I had exactly the same issue as you! Do you have an addon called WebSecurityKeeper installed into your Firefox, without your permission? Check your Addons list pls. I had this addon and when I uninstalled it, my fonts in Firefox returned to normal.
Its possibly a malicious addon. But I am not sure. I have no idea how it got installed my computer.

Unable to disable sub-pixel rendering on fonts

I have an odd situation with my font configuration where I'm trying to disable sub-pixel rendering but certain applications (notably, firefox) do not seem to be respecting my font settings.
I've tried to disable sub-pixel rendering via fontconfig by creating the relevant symlink:
# ln -s ../conf.avail/10-no-sub-pixel.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/10-no-sub-pixel.conf
I have also made sure that this is the lowest-numbered symlink in the /etc/fonts/conf.d directory.
Though I don't think it should matter, I have also ensured that the following files do not exist:
$ rm -rf ~/.fonts.conf.d/
$ rm -rf ~/.fonts.conf
$ rm -rf $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/conf.d/
$ rm -rf $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf
I'm not running a desktop environment and I am using Openbox as my window manager. Currently, chromium doesn't use sub-pixel rendering on its fonts though I'm finding that firefox and openbox do display fonts using sub-pixel rendering despite the aforementioned symlink.
I suspected maybe gconf might have something to do with this but I uninstalled it and the problem still persists.
I am confused as to why different applications would display the fonts differently. Is there some other mechanism for controlling sub-pixel rendering that I am overlooking?
Last edited by battlepanic (2012-12-03 23:48:25)

drcouzelis wrote:
battlepanic wrote:on both machines
Font newbie question: Does being able to see sub-pixel rendering depend on the monitor you're using?
Yes, and no.
Yes in the sense that the design of your monitor matters in order for the subpixel rendering to achieve its intended effect. No in the sense that it will always change the look of your fonts, but it must be properly configured for your particular monitor and in some cases it is simply not going to work correctly.
Sub-pixel rendering doesn't make sense on CRT monitors. If you are using a CRT, you definitely do not want this. It is meant to be used on flatscreen (i.e. LCD, OLED, etc.) monitors and it typically allows for a higher effective vertical resolution at the expense of color fidelity. Some people like this look and some people don't.
The pixel geometry on your LCD monitor matters. If sub-pixel rendering is turned on, whatever software is rendering your fonts needs to know the physical layout of the red, green, and blue pixel components on your monitor. On an flatscreen monitor, the left to right order within each pixel is typically red, green, then blue, though this is not always the case.
A monitor with a high pixel density would also make it more difficult to discern whether or not sub-pixel rendering is turned on by virtue of the fact that as pixel density increases, it becomes more difficult to see the individual pixel components.
Last edited by battlepanic (2012-12-05 23:49:46)

Font smoothing in XFCE

For some reason I seem to have lost the nice font rendering I had in XFCE. I followed another thread in the forums to install an Ubuntu configuration of Cairo and Freetype2. Everything was peachy until I went away on Wednesday and returned on Saturday, suddenly finding that XFCE was displaying various shades of red, blue and yellow on most text that was blue or black on a white background. A quick check in the settings revealed I was now on full hinting, in colour.
I used to use Gnome in Ubuntu which gave me the option of "Best Contrast" which, after searching the web for a while, seems to be a a combination of Full Hinting in Greyscale. Does anybody know how to get the same settings in XFCE?
It offers full-hinting, but ther doesn't seem to be anything the same as "Best Contrast". I presume there should be a way of getting the same effect in the configuration files but I'm not sure where to start looking.
Thanks all.

Thank you brebs, but you weren't kidding its a long post..... now split into two threads. I've tried to follow this but even struggled to find the link to your patch. The people leaving posts on there are jumping all over the place. I think I got your patch installed eventually (there was talk of the Arch patch but I ended up sorting out the Gentoo one because I just couldn't find the beginning of where Arch was discussed) and it does make some of the text more bearable but I still have the smoothing being done with color sub-pixel hinting, and it still leaves a rainbow effect on my letters.
What is annoying is that Ubuntu has an option in Gnome where you can select full hinting, with grayscale smoothing, more commonly known as "Best Contrast". As XFCE and Gnome seem to be using the same rendering engine I just can't understand why there isn't a configuration file somewhere in XFCE where you can achieve exactly the same thing. Either that, or XFCE just cannot render fonts to the same standard as Gnome and I don't know why.
I might try going back to a CRT at this rate.

Font smoothing: RGB vs BGR

Is it possible to setup font smoothing to consider monitor orientation?
When my iMac is placed normally, I get a very nice font smoothing as expected.
When I rotate the iMac 180°, I get nasty color bleeding and the text is harder to read.
In windows there is a setup utility to configure this correctly, is there something similar for OS X?

You can disable sub-pixel rendering by selecting CRT from the popup menu. That's pretty much all the configuration you get.

Font smoothing issues

Hi all. I noticed some others were complaining about font smoothing not seeming to work in Carbon applications (e.g. Camino, Firefox, MS Word and even iTunes). It seems the subpixel font-aliasing system preference (e.g. light) is ignored and, instead, the ugly CRT font smoothing is used.
I am puzzled this has not received a lot of attention, since it immediately bothered me when I received my Macbook Pro today.
Is everyone experiencing this font smoothing problem? I used the Migration Assistant to copy all files from my previous (Tiger-installed) Powerbook. Does anyone not having used the Migration Assistant also suffer from the font smoothing issue?
For more info, see http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1829478&#1829478
Macbook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.6)

TinkerTool didn't make any difference for me. I played around with it and found that there was no improvements using it or disabling font smoothing.
I have watched DVD's on this LCD being played with my MacBook. I have seen 2MB+ full screen digital pictures. Both the DVD and digital pics look absolutely amazing on it.
It's only the fonts that appear blurry or in some areas they appear to have a shadown to the right. This happens with any text that appears in every app.
Keep in mind too, Windows Vista looks perfect on this display, but my prized MacBook looks really sub-par.
I'm not quite following you on changing the display preferences to change to pixel size to that of the MacBook...

Font smoothing issues with Samsun 23 inch LCD

I am having a font smoothing issue with my MacBook and my Samsung LN-S2352W 23 inch LCD (http://www.samsung.com/Products/TV/LCDTV/LNS2352WXXAA.asp). I am using the mini-DVI to VGA adapter and the plugging that into the VGA port of my LCD. It doesn't matter which app I run, but as long as it has fonts, they come out blurry, hazy, colors bleed, etc.
I have played with the font smoothing settings and that has not helped at all. I have heard of TinkerTool and will try it to see if it makes any difference, but am not expecting much.
I also have a PC running Windows Vista and I connected it to the VGA port of my LCD. Wow...the difference in picture quality was astounding. I'm ******. I want my MacBook to look that sweet on my LCD.
Anyone have any thoughts? Can this be fixed?

TinkerTool didn't make any difference for me. I played around with it and found that there was no improvements using it or disabling font smoothing.
I have watched DVD's on this LCD being played with my MacBook. I have seen 2MB+ full screen digital pictures. Both the DVD and digital pics look absolutely amazing on it.
It's only the fonts that appear blurry or in some areas they appear to have a shadown to the right. This happens with any text that appears in every app.
Keep in mind too, Windows Vista looks perfect on this display, but my prized MacBook looks really sub-par.
I'm not quite following you on changing the display preferences to change to pixel size to that of the MacBook...

Get font smoothing in Wine

Well, I already released the newest wine package (1.1.12) to extra. The most interesting feature in this release, for me, is the font smoothing support. Maybe you have noticed that after installing the latest version, still no smooth fonts were used, this is because of the option not being enabled by default. For if you want to use this feature:
nano wine_fontsmoothing.reg
paste this in the file you just opened for writing:
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop]
"FontSmoothing"="2"
"FontSmoothingType"=dword:00000002
"FontSmoothingGamma"=dword:00000578
"FontSmoothingOrientation"=dword:00000001
then, as user:
regedit wine_fontsmoothing.reg
Now launch winecfg, or any of your installed applications through wine, and there you have it. I'm still working out a way to get better smooth fonts, this ones hurt my eyes since the are sub-pixel, and look blueish to me. Any suggestions or help on this is greatly appreciated, I just wanted to get the ball rolling.

userlander wrote:
wow, that really messed up my wine functionality. The only app I use in wine is ImgBurn, and now even after removing the font lines from user.reg the splash screen font looks all ugly, and then the application just locks up. I have to kill it with xkill. How can I fix this now? Did it mess up the registry somehow?
--------------------> okay, fixed it. I tried writing the original .reg file back to the registry, it gave a lot of errors, but it seems to work now. splash screen font is still fuged. not sure what's up with that, might be the WM. just glad to have ImgBurn working again.
Well, this is a limitation from the only font smoothing option wine has so far, here i hope that this will improve eventually.

Font Smoothing Problem?

9800, v6.0.0.246, Platform 6.4.0.105
AT&T
I have noticed that as soon as I started Desktop Service Synchronization, font smooting goes off (see below), before that, everything looks fine. Any clue?
Thanks,
Phil.
Solved!
Go to Solution.

I too had the same problem just last night. It happened when I was changing the font and font size. It seemed that everytime I switched the font and font size, the text got more and more pixelated and less smooth (identical to the screenshot you just posted).
I backed up my Torch, did a security wipe and then restored the backup file back onto the device. That didn't work, as the text still looked horrible.
So what I did next was do a device switch from my Torch back onto my Bold 9000, security wiped the Torch then did a device switch from the Bold 9000 back onto the Torch and the text was back to normal! It was a long process but it seemed to do the trick. So if you have another BlackBerry sitting around it might be worth trying, just remember to back up your Torch before hand.
My Torch is also running v6.0.0.246, Platform 6.4.0.105 through Rogers. Hope this helps you out.
Good Luck!
Ed

Font Smoothing CE 6.0 Thin Clients

We need to handle Font Smoothing on HP Thin Clients. This is supported on newer Thin Clients with RDP7 and Font Smoothing settings.
Older Win CE 6.0 do not appear to support Font Smoothing.
Is there a way to set up Font Smoothothing or can these thin clients be updated with RDP option to support Font Smoothing?
Thanks Lex

I too had the same problem just last night. It happened when I was changing the font and font size. It seemed that everytime I switched the font and font size, the text got more and more pixelated and less smooth (identical to the screenshot you just posted).
I backed up my Torch, did a security wipe and then restored the backup file back onto the device. That didn't work, as the text still looked horrible.
So what I did next was do a device switch from my Torch back onto my Bold 9000, security wiped the Torch then did a device switch from the Bold 9000 back onto the Torch and the text was back to normal! It was a long process but it seemed to do the trick. So if you have another BlackBerry sitting around it might be worth trying, just remember to back up your Torch before hand.
My Torch is also running v6.0.0.246, Platform 6.4.0.105 through Rogers. Hope this helps you out.
Good Luck!
Ed

Turn off font smoothing

I love thin clear fonts when they are not smoothed. Please FIND A WAY to turn font smoothing off.
I turn it off from windows 7 also. I don't know why are you so in love with the ugly font smoothing, which makes the fonts appear bloated and fuzzy.
PLEASE APPLE MAKE IT TURN OFF!

Thanks, I appreciate it, but I know that.
And it doesn't work. It doesn't deactivate it from menu, from XCode pop-up menus, that option is completely useless.
I think Mac fails miserably with fonts, and it just ruins an otherwise good OS.
It doesn't look as bad on retina displays, but that's only because you have twice as many pixels to work with.
And still it bloats the fonts unnecessarily.
It's just ugly.
I was so mad with fonts, I wanted to write my own kerner driver just to turn smoothing off.
It's just horrible, and for a company that takes pride in being the first to bring truetype fonts and graphic user interface, having tasteless fonts is just bad.
Windows also tried to follow you, they added an ugly Segoe font and some other font to their Outlook. Luckily I can redirect them into Arial or Verdana through registry. With Mac it's really built into their OS. This ugly Lucida Grande... What's so nice about this font?
I may sound like I am trashing or ranting, but I speak this way in hopes that somebody notices and makes a normal update to the otherwise normal OS. Their font is just ugly. It looks ugly. There is nothing nice about the way Mac makes fonts smoothing. It would be much better off if it could have been turned off.
Just because the developers of Mac OS is used to seing their font uglyfied by smoothing, and sees no harm in it, doesn't mean everybody shares their preferences. I am a developer too, and I also produce software for sale, It's the user who they should listen, they will be surprised to learn how wrong they are...
Dan

How can I get clearer, smoother fonts?

Hi again. You guys helped me out so well with my last question that i know you'll be able to help me out with this one!
How can I make my fonts look as clear as possible?
I'm running at 1400x1050 resolution with xorg and xfce4.
I've ensured that anti-aliasing is turned on and have enabled sub-pixel hinting but I find that my fonts appear "fuzzy".
Excuse me for mentioning the 'W' work here but my Windows XP installation with ClearType enabled gives me lovely clear fonts and I was hoping to get the same in Linux.
When I installed xorg (or was that xfce4? I forget) a message was displayed on screen referring to uncommenting a line in a config file somewhere for anti-aliasing or hinting, but I foolishly didn't note it down so I don't know what it was or where to find it! Or even if this would help me.
How have you managed to make your fonts nice and clear?

cyberfrem wrote:When I installed xorg (or was that xfce4? I forget) a message was displayed on screen referring to uncommenting a line in a config file somewhere for anti-aliasing or hinting, but I foolishly didn't note it down so I don't know what it was or where to find it! Or even if this would help me.
thats is in /etc/fonts/local.conf, autohinter to false. Subpixel is in there as well.
You may also want to double check your xorg.conf is correct.

10.5.6 - Any way to disable font smoothing?

Trying to see if there was a way to disable font smoothing for all sized of fonts. The so called smoothed fonts look plain washed out, I hate it.

Did you restart? Have you repaired permissions? If so, then there's something else going on. The first thing I'd try is to change display resolution. BTW, you need to add the OS version you're running in your My Settings file so responders have that info for troubleshooting.

Font smoothing issue between built-in display and external

Ok, this one is a bit tricky to explain, but here we go. I have a Macbook 2.2 C2D and a 24" FHD2400 Gateway LCD which I connect using the mini-DVI port. My problem is that any applications I start with the external display plugged in have slightly "thinner" text (on both displays), like the font smoothing is different. But, applications that were already running look smoother and thicker on both displays. Further, even after disconnecting the external display, the thinner text persists until I restart the application.
As a real example, I was running Safari with just the main LCD. I plugged in the external, and it looked fine. I restarted Safari (now with the external plugged in) and the text appears thinner. Unplugging the external, the text still appears thinner on the main LCD until I restart it again.
Here is a photo, where the left side is the thinner text, and the right is the normal, thicker text:
Any insight/advice on this would be much appreciated.
* Note: I run the main LCD in native resolution (1280x800) and the 24" in native (1920x1200)
Message was edited by: Chris Scharf (added screen resolution information)

Under System Preferences, Appearance, try setting "Font smoothing style: to "Medium - best for Flat Panel" and see if that helps.

Font smoothing, font sizing, sub-pixel tuning, OS X vs Windows

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