Font Fuzziness on the Screen
As noted earlier in this chapter, printed type generated by Mac OS X always looks smooth and terrific, at all sizes and on any printer.
On the screen, however, some people describe the type in Mac OS X as remarkably smooth—while others describe it as fuzzy. There’s a lot of confusion regarding Mac OS X’s jaggies-eliminating technology, which is technically referred to as antialiasing.
Mac OS X’s success in enhancing screen type depends primarily on the size of the type. If you find that very small type is too fuzzy for comfort, open System Preferences, click the General icon, and choose a higher number from the “Turn off text smoothing for font sizes __ and smaller” pop-up menu. The setting you assign here affects type in every program, including the Finder.
Furthermore, a new 10.2 feature lets you change the style of this font smoothing; see Section 8.11 for details and illustrations.
Note
You can’t make Mac OS X apply antialiasing to eight-point type or smaller—at least not without the help of TinkerTool 2, which you can download from the software page at http://www.missingmanuals.com.
Get Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
