Rubénerd Blog :)

I remember reading on one of the Mac forums I frequent that somebody thought it wasn’t the major changes that Apple makes to it’s software that set it apart from other vendors, it’s the little, less publicised things that make their systems that much more of a pleasure to use in little but meaningful ways. Aside from a couple of of blunders I completely agree.

Case in point, Snow Leopard comes bundled with a new monospace font called Menlo which is shaping (ha, pun) out to be one of my favourite new features. If you haven’t noticed it, launch Font Book.app and bask in its awesomeness!

If you’re on Snow Leopard reading this, you should be able to tell the difference:

This is Monaco, my previous favourite
This is Andele Mono, from the Home Brew Terminal theme
This is Menlo, my new favourite monospaced font!

I’m not a graphics designer so I don’t know the language I’m supposed to use when describing fonts, ligatures, serifs and the like but Menlo is brilliant. It’s as if they took Monaco and Fixedsys from the early Windows and DOS days and made a slightly more "retro modern" typeface. Because each character is slightly shorter, lines of text also seem more evenly spaced. The font smoothing and anti-aliasing also look really good.

I’ve set Menlo as my default font in Terminal.app and TextMate and am thorougly loving it. I’ve also gone ahead and added it to my CSS for this site, so if you’re running Snow Leopard you’ll see it in code samples! Font porn?

code, pre, .mono, .grilled_cheese_sandwich {
    /* Mac, Mac, FLOSS, Windows, All */

    font-family: Menlo, Monaco, "DejaVu Sans Mono",
        "Lucida Console", monospace;
}

As much as I love Linux and FreeBSD desktop environments like Gnome and Xfce, the presentation of fonts and typefaces still keep me looking forward to programming and working on my Mac above all else, though they are improving in leaps and bounds. I don’t consider Windows to be a viable contender with it’s subpar onscreen font rendering.

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.