Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Tired Of This!

Z

zeiter

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 19, 2008
384
3
Canada
Hello there,

I am writing again because I cannot stand this anymore. I went to pick up another monitor to test the text appearance on a new monitor to see if it was my samsung or my dvi cable...do not worry, I will get reimbursed. It does the same thing so I am thinking it might be my videocard or something.

For example, when I am chatting in skype and I do this " !!!! ", not all the ! have the same black and two of them look washed away. It happens to a lot of letters when I write things...It is annoying when you try to read or write something in word.

So, my question is, what do you think could be the source problem. Could it be my video out? or is this supposed to be another crap thing I must endure as a new mac user because macs prefer it to look like it is print or do we have to buy their $600 screen to get perfect text appearance...well actually, when I print my text, all letters have the same black level. Sorry, but I am tired and pretty pissed about this...

Thank you everybody

EDIT: it does the same thing on my macbook pro when used without an external display. I was wondering if this is normal or my video card is messed up. thank you!
 
Could it be the font or program you are typing in? I have found that certain apps (poorly coded usually) display random characters a little off from what they should be.
 
A picture is worth 1000 words.

It'd be easier to help if you had a picture or a screenshot or something.
 
six.four said:
A picture is worth 1000 words.

It'd be easier to help if you had a picture or a screenshot or something.
Click to expand...

It's kind of hard...because your monitor will actually see it as alright no? I noticed that the bigger the font is, the problem is less present!
 
textmacbookproxi5.jpg
 
Your screenshot shows JPG artefact and thus doesn't help that much. ;) Try using PNG please.

What you experience is most likely just Apple's equivalent of "Cleartype" aka Font smoothing (no idea how Apple actually calls it). It uses the RGB subpixels of your screen to display fonts at a virtually higher horizontal resolution.

To make it visible keep CTRL pressed and use the two-finger swipe upwards to zoom in. You will notice red coloring on the left side of fonts and blue on the right side. At native resolution and without zooming the eyes wont notice the colors anymore and thus the effective horizontal resolution is nearly trippled.

Some fonts are not so suitable for this kind of "effect" so I advice you to set another font in those applications where it bugs you most. Bigger fonts are also less prone to problems because only the edges are affected, which obviously makes a bigger part with small fonts.

It may also be that your application does not use this font smoothing technique but rather only uses grey pixels to do the smoothing. While that looks good on big fonts, it usually degrades small fonts readability considerably.

You can change the smoothing method and minimum font size that smoothing is used on via the Appearance Settings! (german version here, so I hope I found the correct translation).
 
Here is the .png version

text2vz8.png



So, you are telling me everyone is experimenting the same thing as me and it doesn't bother them and everything? Look, even in writing with office, I have to change the font to all my programs...isn't it kind of stupid and ridiculous?
 
Took me a while to see what the problem was.

I just tried !!!!!!!!!!!! on a dell monitor, same thing. But at high resolutions. I think you will find the same problem if you use high rez on any monitor. This is probably more of an issue with LCD and native resolutions.

If it really concerns you, go to a Apple shop and try it on a few monitors.
 
MH01 said:
Took me a while to see what the problem was.

I just tried !!!!!!!!!!!! on a dell monitor, same thing. But at high resolutions. I think you will find the same problem if you use high rez on any monitor. This is probably more of an issue with LCD and native resolutions.

If it really concerns you, go to a Apple shop and try it on a few monitors.
Click to expand...

well on my windows box, everything is fine...so this is a mac os x issue or what?
 
zeiter said:
well on my windows box, everything is fine...so this is a mac os x issue or what?
Click to expand...

In that case, if the res was the same. Could be the display card. Likely a driver issue. Not sure you will get a quick fix to this
 
MH01 said:
In that case, if the res was the same. Could be the display card. Likely a driver issue. Not sure you will get a quick fix to this
Click to expand...

well, I tried 2 different monitors and dvi cables it it is the same, even in my internal macbook pro display. It is quite annoying.
 
heres my string of !s.

Pretty sure Timur's explanation is spot on.
 

Attachments

  • Picture 1.png
    Picture 1.png
    2.9 KB · Views: 671
zeiter said:
well on my windows box, everything is fine...so this is a mac os x issue or what?
Click to expand...

Mac and Windows use different techniques for font antialiasing. Ever notice that the text in the Windows versions of Apple's apps looks off, somehow? It's because Apple ported their rendering system and used that instead of the native one. The flip side is that most Mac users despair at the way fonts are rendered in Windows. :p

You can control font antialiasing in System Preferences (Appearance section). There's several levels, and you can disable it for small fonts.
 
NoNameBrand said:
You can control font antialiasing in System Preferences (Appearance section). There's several levels, and you can disable it for small fonts.
Click to expand...
Didn't I say that already?! ;)

No one seems to have tried that yet. But I tried myself quickly and oddly couldn't notice a difference. I suspect that you need to log off for the changes to happen, but I did not mess with it enough yet (need to get Windows running for audio-performance on my MBP first).
 
Timur said:
Didn't I say that already?! ;)

No one seems to have tried that yet. But I tried myself quickly and oddly couldn't notice a difference. I suspect that you need to log off for the changes to happen, but I did not mess with it enough yet (need to get Windows running for audio-performance on my MBP first).
Click to expand...

seriously dude, i cannot stand it. I wonder what I will do. :( everything was so cool then this pain the "beep" problem appeared :(
 
Sounds like a bug then, the settings should have at least some effect. Let's report to Apple and have it fixed. :)
 
my powerbook does the same thing,

it's not a problem! it's not the OS, it's not your GPU, it's not the polarity of the earth shifting; it's not anything having to do with your computer. some character spacings aren't going to line up with the pixels on your display. that's all it is. take a print course and you'll learn about leading and kerning. the font characters are spaced according to the parameters of the font, and the GPU will display them where they belong. if it doesn't line up perfectly with your display's pixels (which it NEVER will), you'll get that weird "thin-thick/slanty/blurred" kind of effect.

just enjoy it !!!!!

(yep, mine did it there too!)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back