suddenly, fuzzy / blurred text for desktop icons

[radhak]

Help! this evening I applied the latest security patch from Apple for Safari, and restarted my iMac. Now, all the desktop icons have very fuzzy / blurred / bleeding text. I tried re-logging in, restarting, even tried changing the font-smoothing style, to no avail. Can anybody help?

I am attaching a part of a screenshot of the desktop.

Funny, that no other text inside browsers / editors seems affected, and even icons in other Finder windows are normal.
And when i login with a different user, the desktop is perfectly fine there!

[Gymnut]

Hmm...possibly check in the System preferences for Universal Access. Looks like your enhance contrast for seeing impaired has gotten adjusted. There's a slide bar that you can adjust on the bottom.

[radhak]

thanks gymnut; i am on jaguar still, so the slide bar is not available for me. i played around with the other options there, but no go :(

is there any way i can 'revert back to yesterday'? i am sure this is not because of the Safari patch of today (else it should happen for other logins too), but something is different today from yesterday, when i had no problems.

or will i need to create another account and forever work in that...? man, that would be weird, to leave a login behind, so to speak!

[Nermal]

Go to Sys Prefs -> Appearance and make sure the "font smoothing style" is set to the correct mode fo your display (Standard for CRT, Medium for LCD). The thing underneath it, turn off smoothing for size, is set to 8 by default.

[MoparShaha]

It looks like a glitch, not a preference issue. It looks like it is just displaying the drop shadow, and not the white text itself. It might be overkill, but I think I'd just reinstall Jaguar.

[Gymnut]

My December edition of Machome arrived today and someone wrote in with the same problem with their flat panel iMac. The following is reply from Machome:

"Choose System Preferences from the Apple Menu and click General. At the bottom of the window you'll see options for something called "font smoothing" (a.ka. anti-aliasing). This technology softens the edges of pixilated text to give it a more accurate appearance. In the past, font smoothing only made use of monochromatic pixels to tailor text. This meant that the edges of black text were smoothed with gray pixels of varying intensities, and it looked great on standard glass-tube displays. Unfortunately, the same text looked chunky on flat-panel displays. As flat-panel displays became more popular, it became clear that there had to be a different font-smoothing solution for these displays. What emerged was technology called "subpixel rendering," which independently controls the red, green and blue subelements of a pixel for greater clarity. So, to get your text looking its best, choose "Medium-best for Flat Panel" from the font smoothing pop-up menu. To see immediate results, Log Out from the Apple Menu and then log back into your user account."

Hope this helps if you haven't already solved your problem.

[radhak]

Gymnut and others, appreciate your help.

i tried all that just now, but it did not help.

where can i change the font / size / etc for the desktop icon text?
i vaguely remember having done this earlier but am unable to find it in the preferences; am thinking that maybe i could tweak something there.

i am hesitating to re-install the OS because this seems to be cosmetic, and only at the desktop; everything else seems to work, even other logins.

[radhak]

i resolved it, sorta.

found out that the text size for the icons are managed from the finder -> view - > view options, and reduced the font size by 1, from 12 to 11, and the wooly look has gone.

no idea why it suddenly chose to not work, because it always worked nice at the original font size of 12. maybe applying the security patch changed some setting somewhere that i can't investigate.

anyway, lemme hope it does not recur. (theres only so much i can reduce the font ;) )

[Gymnut]

Well glad to hear you've solved your problem. I know for one my vision is already blurry as it is and certainly don't need my monitor to be remind me so. :D