incredibly blurry text

iainr

iainr

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Hi folks,

Have had a bit of a search, but couldn't find anything quite like this (although some related themes which have helped point me in the right direction :) Apologies in advance for any newbie-related hiccups...

I've just got myself a 15.2" Powerbook off Ebay, after a good few years with Wintel laptops. Very happy with it - 800mhz/512MB seems quite happy running all my apps. The screen is really crisp and sharp for graphics, and menus etc. look good and crisp. Its running at the default 1280x854.

But the fonts - oh the fonts! Especially in a browser (which is where I spend most of my time). The anti-aliasing is awful. I've tried Safari, Camino, Firefox - even IE, and they're all equally bad. Am running OS X 10.3.9 by the way.

Have googled it (which is how I found this excellent forum) and had a search here, and it seems to be a known issue - I just wish I'd checked in advance - I mean this is seriously causing me eyestrain, to the point where the powerbook is in danger of being sold on again...

Have played around with the various anti-aliasing settings, including the threshold for turning it off below *px (being careful to log out and back in again each time, so it would take effect). None of them are any good! I can see the difference, but the "best for LCD" might be the best - it's still awful!

Surely this must cause problems for other people, or am I missing some really obvious fix?

Is it any better in Tiger? I don't need to upgrade, but would do it just for crisper fonts.

I'm just seriously amazed/disappointed. Are there really hundreds of thousands of design-literate people giving themselves headaches every day, or are macs only supposed to be for graphics, not for text? Please tell me I'm doing something wrong! :confused:
 
Get TinkerTool http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html

Go to "Font Smoothing" tab.

Choose "Turn off font smoothing for fonts less than .x pt", and make it w/e u want. You can set it at 144, and never have smoothing on again :)

EDIT: Also, in your System Preferences, go to Appearance/ Font Smoothing Style and turn it to "Light".

Hope this helps.
 
Thanks both for the quick feedback!

Yep, I'd already tried all the font smoothing settings in the system prefs - even, in desperation, the CRT one! LOL

TinkerTool has done the trick though - thanks Qion :) Had to disable smoothing for programs using "Quick Draw" to make an improvement in the browsers. It's great now - give me spindly over blurry any day of the week!

Have also turned it off for apps using Quartz, which has made my app menus aliased, too... I didn't find them blurry anyway, but they're fine either way - I'm just happy my headache can diminish now :)

Thanks again folks!
 
Ahr! That ruined the whole look of the menu bar for me, with that twiggy text. I'm happy with anti-aliasing below about 14px The larger stuff looks better when it's less sharp.

Anyway thanks for mentioning that program has a few other useful options that I didn't know about either.
 
I've never had a problem with font smoothing, and I have my preferences set to Strong. I'll include an example of fonts that I am currently seeing on this page so that you can judge whether they are blurry or not (one man's blurry is another man's sharp ;)).

If you change the Font Smoothing property in the Appearance tab, you may have to relaunch your applications before seeing any effect.
 

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Yours looks a bit blotchy to me, reminds me of linux fonts before you go through all the hassle of fixing those. I use the same thing though, just the generic controls in the control panels but mine look a bit smoother than yours are some how and anything below the size of the actual comments font on here gets anti aliased.

EDIT: screen shot so you can see the difference I'm talking about.
 

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Like I've said. One man's blurry is another man's sharp :). I like my fonts better than the way yours are rendered. I think I like the fact that mine are darker and more solid. Personally, I find them more readable that way. The fonts in your screenshot look a little washed out on my monitor and I've seen stuff like that before, in Acrobat Reader and I've found such text a problem after long periods of time.

Good thing you can configure font rendering eh? Or else there'd be no end to the amount of whining we'd see. :D
 
iainr said:
Thanks both for the quick feedback!

TinkerTool has done the trick though - thanks Qion :) Had to disable smoothing for programs using "Quick Draw" to make an improvement in the browsers. It's great now - give me spindly over blurry any day of the week!
Click to expand...
Now this is a problem in and of itself — tweaking the QuickDraw font smoothing should have absolutely no effect on your browsers, since they should be using Quartz's font smoothing, which is much, much better. The only programs that use QuickDraw to render fonts these days are old Carbon apps built for OS 9 compatibility (like AppleWorks; really, Apple, when will you update that thing! :mad: ).

If Safari and Firefox are using QuickDraw, you might have some third-party utility installed that's causing conflicts. I have no idea what it would be, though.

Out of curiosity, have you tried using Silk? It's a little hack that makes all apps use Quartz for fonts instead of QuickDraw. You really shouldn't need it for apps like Safari, but it might be worth a shot.
 
Yea, you wana see my, 'ugly fonts' post at the linux forum I used when I first switched to Redhat ! :D Poor people, they're all in therapy now. :D
 
there was, once, a time where MacOSX' text smooting was so good people talked about it. it was so crsip, but nt jaggy or spindly. it was like laser printed text. boot up on your panther cd (hold down c when rebooting.) i seem to remember the menu bar text looking very crisp from a boot cd... not sure why, but it looks worse in tiger
 
Linux fonts, especially in GNOME 2.8 look fantastic. They are equal to Panther's fonts, and occasionally I think they render better too. Tiger blows GNOME away though.
 
Was just searching for a solution for this, because even though one year has passed since this post arrived here, the problem persists:

mac-vs-linux.png


The font smoothing in Tiger 10.4.7 is absolutely tearing my eyes - So much so that im close at returning my 4 hours old Mac Mini because of it.

The linux fonts in the example is from the newest Ubuntu.
 
It's interesting how those smoothed fonts bug the heck out of some people. In your pic above it looks like the Apple smoothing shown is heavier than the Linux smoothing. You can, of course, set that in System Preferences, but the last time I tried messing with the font smoothing I saw no change.

In any case, the fonts don't bother me at all.

Garfi: Did you try using Tinkertool (see message way above) to turn off smoothing altogether in OS X?

Doug
 
dktrickey said:
You can, of course, set that in System Preferences, but the last time I tried messing with the font smoothing I saw no change.
Click to expand...
When you change the font smoothing setting, it will NOT affect any running applications. You'll need to quit & reload each application to see the change. To see the change all across the system, you should log out and back in.

Why Apple doesn't at least put a notice about this incredibly unintuitive behavior is beyond me. But then, Apple's Appearance control panel/preference pane has had very poor UI design ever since it was introduced in OS 8. It's kind of weird. I think they do it on purpose for the irony of it. ;)
 
Yeah the first exampel is made with tinkertools, but I prefer most fonts to be smoothed out so no AA at all is even worse; it reminds me of the dreadfull ugly font problem days I had on linux a few years ago.

I have tried the 5 different smoothing options that is possible through the system preferences, but it still does smoothing on straight lines, leaving e.g. the " as two blurry spots. The thing I like about the linux smoothing is that it leaves straight lines alone, notice how the top T in the mac smoothing example seems to be half transparent and the middle line in the F of federal is almost missing - it makes my brain go, uh gotta focus the eyes more.

But it seems people get used to it, so maybe I will too - though its still a delight to see the linux fonts when I start the old box.
 
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