Turning off font blending


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Hey all,

I am looking into buying a mac laptop so I checked out some at the lab in school. I opened up Office X and tried typing like I would on my PC and noticed that the text looks very hard to read. I also noticed this when I checked out Neowin in Safari. Is there a way to turn off the blending so the text looks crisp??? It made it look like I was typing a PDF and reading those damn things are hard enough on the eyes sometimes.

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It could be that the font smoothing is not turned on. OS X looks very bad without the aliasing on. Office X also has it turned off by default. In fact, it wasn't even a feature until the latest version, so you even have to get the latest update just to get it. I am highly doubting that the aliasing is on and you find it too hard to read. It will be much worse with it off.

Microsoft's clear type is a little more advanced than OS X's, so don't expect the same quality.

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The easiest way to disable font smoothing on os x is to use tinkertool - just set it to disable font smoothing for fonts > 32 pt (the appearance panel in os x only lets you go up to 12pt)

I'm sure you can go "defaults write com.apple.something.something.something 32" in a terminal window and have it work too - I'm just not sure exactly what the syntax is.

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On topic: Definitely try the different levels of font smoothing in the Appearance part of System Preferences. I have mine set for Medium - Best for Flat Panel because of my iBook's LCD. The others don't look as good to me.

smoothing.jpg

Why anyone would want to turn OFF Quartz's Anti-Aliasing is beyond me... I tried it once when I was going for an OS 9 retrospective look and believe me, it's not pretty.

Off topic: Love the Clerks stuff tim :D

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