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 called 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 Appearance 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.

You can also change the style of this font smoothing; see Section 4.5 for details and illustrations.

Tip

You can’t make Mac OS X apply antialiasing to 8-point type or smaller—at least not without the help of TinkerTool, which you can download from the “Missing CD” page at http://www.missingmanuals.com.

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