Leopard font display

Well, in Tiger Safari your post looks like this:

 

Wow... you guys crack me up.

Yea, font smoothing has always been one of those customizable things.

To change it, go to "System Preferences" -> "Appearance"

If you want even more control, you will need to install Xcode, and it will give you quite a few tools to change all that stuff.

I am sure that most people are perfectly fine with "Automatic" font smoothing.

Personally, I have found the default ClearType settings in Windows to be very fuzzy for me and have needed to use their "ClearType Wizard" from the Microsoft Windows PowerToys site to get it set up so that it doesn't hurt my eyes.

 

Xcode is the OS X development tools.

It is a full IDE (Integrated Development Environment) equivalent to Microsoft's Visual Studio.

On top of the IDE, it also has several tools for testing and configuring pretty much anything on your system.

There is an application in it for adjusting the font smoothing options system-wide, not just for web browsing.

 

I've always found that font smoothing is a matter of getting used to. Every time I go onto an OS I haven't used for a while, it irritates my eyes, then after a few days, it seems good...

 

Apple and Microsoft took different approaches to on-screen font rendering in their operating systems. Apple's Quartz implementation more accurately preserves the design of a typeface at the expense of sharpness on low-DPI displays. Microsoft's ClearType, on the other hand, forces a typeface to render on pixel boundaries, which improves low-DPI sharpness at the expense of overall WYSIWYG accuracy.

Which way is better on today's hardware is a matter of some debate. As we transition towards higher-DPI displays in the near future, Apple's approach should prove more scalable.

As for changes to this technology in Leopard, Apple hasn't announced any.

 

You will get used to the font smoothing quite quickly and then you will realize how ugly everything looks on Windows...

 

I've actually noticed that the font smoothing in Leopard is very buggy compared to Tiger... anything between 8-10 looks like s**t. ie, unreadable unless selected. hopefully a bug which will be fixed soon.

 

Hi can you tell me what tool you use in Xcode to adjust the font smoothing options system-wide? That would be really useful for me.

thanks,

Jeff

 

Safari on OS X has much nicer font smoothing than Safari on Windows. See the screenshot above (and/or take a look at a real life Mac in a store).