How do you have your font smoothed?

[keogh]

Howdy,

I posted a similar thread on the Windows forum about ClearType, and I'm intrigured to know what people, using macs, have thier font smoothing set at in the "Appearance" area of the Sys prefs?

I have ClearType off on Vista, but in OS X theres no way (built into the OS) to turn it off all together? I know theres a command you can run in Terminal that tells OS X to turn smoothing off for fonts 100 and smaller or whatever, but why can you not turn it off?

I have it at:

Automatic - best for main display
8 and smaller

Do any of you run that terminal command to turn it off all together? Font smoothing can ruin some webpages!

What setting do you have it at?

ta

 

[Sic]

what web pages are ruined using font smoothing in OSX? links please, I want to see what you mean!

what I hate is Safari on Windows - the text all looks awful on that!

I have it at the default settings, and it always looks great! OSX users are spoiled with things like that, though. I hate creating a site in OSX then looking at it in Windows, it always looks horrible by comparison.

 

[MagicBoy]

OS X font smoothing looks great. Cleartype improves readability but mucks around with the font so it looks wrong. Apple's method is technically more accurate and preserved the original font features.

That said I prefer Cleartype on with an LCD. Looks terrible on a CRT tho.

Ruined webpages are more likely due to bad coding (ie designed for IE) than anything Mac related.

I'm off to install Windows 3.1 in a VM to relive the old days of blocky fonts

 

[Deleted member 651465]

I'm guessing that coming from a Windows background is the reason they look so "wrong".

As MacigBoy said, Apple's technique is somewhat more accurate (and can be great if you're using Safari whilst viewing a high quality website *think New York Times*), but for the majority it's not noticable after a while.

For the poor souls who can't quite grasp it try using TinkerTool to turn it off completely.