With the introduction of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing. Fortunately, there is a workaround!
Previously on Leopard
In Leopard and earlier versions of Mac OS X, if you opened System Preferences and chose Appearance, you could choose the level of font smoothing on your monitor with a handy drop down box.
On Snow Leopard…
For some reason, Apple decided in Snow Leopard to to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing aside from a single checkbox, instead relying on LCDs to report what settings should be used. The problem is, support for this is spotty and sometimes the results look terrible.
The solution!
Fortunately you can still adjust this manually. Open the Terminal in your Utilities folder, then enter the following code on one line. Replace the "2" with a number between 1 and 4, depending on how much smoothing you want.
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2
The changes will only take effect on newly opened applications. The easiest way I’ve found is just to log out and log in again.
Heaven knows why Apple user interface designers decided to remove access to this feature.
[...] #Mac font smoothing on #SnowLeopard annoys you? http://rubenerd.com/font-smoothing-snow-leopard/ a few seconds ago from [...]
Add Asus to the “Manufacturers that get screwed in 10.6″ list. This fixed it up nicely, though.
Thanks so much for this! Why did they remove this option?
Keywords for searches: Leopard font smooth smoothing command plist font LCD light medium strong terminal
Awesome!
That’s what I was looking for. Thank you!
Thanks for the tip.Btw you are the first hit in google if you are looking for “font smoothing snow leopard”.
Glad I could be of help everyone.
It’s pretty clear by the amount of feedback that Apple has made a bad decision removing graphical configuration of font smoothing / anti aliasing. Here’s hoping as they did with hierarchical stacks in Leopard after negative feedback they give us the option back in a future update.
How do you undo if you decide to go back?
Thanks.
I believe unselecting then reselecting the “Use LCD font smoothing when available” checkbox in the Apperance prefpane will reset anything you change in the Terminal.
If you reboot the change seems to go back. How can we make this permanent
The change is permanent for me.
I cannot get the graphical configuration at all, NO change. I entered in Terminal exactly as advised:
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 4
Any idea why ? I did a restart and a shutdown but nothing worked to change it.
What am I doing wrong ?
That’s no good Claud, how irritating :(
Have you tried entering 1, 2 or 3? Your display might not be supported for level 4 for some reason.
I’ve heard there are some wildlife groups trying to get Apple to do more stuff with the actual S.L.’s lol. I don’t know- people are saying it’s good PR for Apple- they should jump on that.
Great, the fonts were really ugly, now everything fine again :)
In early January, I upgraded to a new Mac. Like many others, I am dismayed by the way that Snow Leopard renders fonts onscreen compared with Tiger. In an attempt to force the system to apply font smoothing, I used the Terminal to enter the string above.
First, there was no apparent change in the way fonts are rendered, but second the string causes the Appearance prefpane to crash.
In reviewing the thread above, it occurs to me that the comments and suggestions were made based on experience with the original Snow Leopard (10.6.0 or .1) while my new machine is running 10.6.2 It seems quite likely that the many font that were ‘corrected’ in the update likely conflict with the string.
Be warned, enter the string above at your own risk if you’re running 10.6.2
I’m on hold right now with Apple tech support to try to reverse the problem but it appears that a system reinstall is the likely solution.
hey Kent, I’m also running 10.6.2 and have not applied the change yet. Were you able to resolve your problem with the Appearance prefpane crashing?
I applied the change to my 10.6.2 machine and everything is working fine for me
Sorry for the lateness of my reply, WordPress sorts comments from old posts further down for some reason.
I’ve tried this font smoothing workaround on my Mac with 10.6.2 and it works fine. I’m sorry you had problems Kent, were you able to solve the problem?
I just tried this on my new MacBook Pro running 10.6.3: success. Text looks much better on the Fujitsu-Siemens monitor.
Thanks!
I too can confirm that this does indeed work in 10.6.3. I had just bought a new HP monitor to replace my recently deceased Apple 30″ :( Anyway the fonts looked terrible and it was really making me miss my old monitor. But, after applying this fix I am feeling a little better about the new monitor. The colors seem really saturated, but I think thats because it has that glossy display thing going on. At least the fonts look good now though.