Font smoothing in Snow Leopard
Saturday 29th August 2009 — Comments (17)
For some reason, Apple decided in Snow Leopard to disable graphical configuration of font smoothing (aka sub pixel rendering) and instead rely upon LCDs to report what settings should be used. Problem is, support for this is spotty with some panels and the resulting fonts look rough and pixelated.
On regular Leopard if you open the Appearance prefpane you’re presented with a drop down box where you can choose how heavy font smoothing is applied, as shown in the screenshot above. On Snow Leopard all you get is an ambiguous checkbox saying "Use LCD font smoothing when available" without any option to choose by how much:
Fortunately you can still adjust this manually by opening Terminal.app and entering the following command with an integer between 1 and 4 (representing the 4 previously available options), then re-opening your applications. Easiest way is to enter this, then log out and log back in.
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2
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