Anti-aliasing in MacOS X

R

Romendo

Guest
Hello everyone,

since I am in the market for a new computer I also want to look at the new PowerMac G5s. It has been a little while since I looked at the MacOS. One thing, though, that always annoyed me was that everything in MacOS X is anti-aliased.

I have read that disabling anti-aliasing doesn't affect all applications and that the font rendering is not as good as it was in MacOS 9.

I really love the fonts in Windows. The are very nicely rendered.

Now my questions: Is it possible to make anti-aliased fonts in MacOS X look as good as they are in Windows? I am really picky when it comes to that. Especially with LCD monitors I find that anti-aliasing is not needed. Also, my monitor(s) can be adjusted in such a way that they look less sharp. The effect is much better than even ClearType.

Any information, maybe even some screenshots, would be very much appreciated.

Romendo
 
well you can select to "Turn off text smoothing for font sizes ... and smaller" in the preferences between 8 and 12. But with a little unix command (it's prolly somewhere on the forum) you can make that any size. So let's say u turn off text smoothing for fonts smaller than 500 and pretty much all the fonts get affected :)

and as far as I know this works in all apps


I, myself on my 15" flat-panel imac keep fonts larger than 8 anti-aliased and it looks ok
 
Font AA in OSX is not as bad as you think. Text without AA in OSX on the other hand is awful. You will find moer often than not, Carbon applications do not have AA fonts. There is a Haxie (Silk) to make Carbon apps' fonts look nice.

What you could do is go to an Apple store if one is near you and check them out and see if the font is to your liking.
 
windows AA is the worst thing ever.!! what are u talking about.. it looks like straight lined fonts with slightly rounded edges.. and they tend to be rendered really close together! (not really spaced out)
 
Yeah, OS X without Anti-aliasing is butt-ugly!!!

That was a screenshot I took on my G4 Server running Mac OS X Server v10.2.6 with AppleAntiAliasingThreshold set to 16 in response to a request on the MacWorld forums. Looks like a Windows mod.

The command for anyone interested (don't know why anyone would want to):
PHP: 
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleAntiAliasingThreshold '16'

Log out and back in to see the jaggy awfulness of it all.
 
Thanks for the replies.

First of all, I didn't say that AA fonts in Windows are great. I hate AA fonts on any operating system (MacOS X, Windows, Linux). However, the font rendering on Windows without AA is great.

From the screenshot of fonts without AA I can see that the font rendering on MacOS X is not that great. Maybe it is because the default fonts are so big? But then, the text I am typing right here is fairly large but wonderfully rendered.

There are no Apple Stores in Austria. Maybe in 10 years. There is a Mac Store right across from the place where I work. I pass it every day. Howerver, they haven't had a single Mac on display for ages. They put up this new sign of the G5. That is really funny. Not only is that thing not available (and the sign doesn't even mention that fact), they also never have a Mac in their showroom anyway. It is pathetic.

So I don't really know what to do. Everybody seems to get so excited about AA fonts, but I hate them. It makes everything so fuzzy. I want the fonts to look as sharp as possible. Maybe using Arial and Tomaha fonts from my Windows machine would help...
 
Font rendering (with or without) AA in OSX is not the biggest problem for me. What I hate is when the text is in a dialog with those stupid stripes in the background. The stripes make it harder to read the text. I solved this problem by replacing Aqua with the BBX Mercury theme.

Everyone will have their own opinion of font rendering in different OSes, my opinion is I like font rendering and AA in Windows XP because it's consistent. This is not true in OSX, a lot of Carbon apps don't have font AA and it makes them inconsistent with the rest of the system. I see that as a flaw. Even when I use a haxie (silk) to make Carbon apps have AA text it slows down the responsiveness of the app.

But probably the nicest font rendering I've used is in Gentoo linux with Bitstream Vera font used system wide on everything.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top