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I love thin clear fonts when they are not smoothed. Please FIND A WAY to turn font smoothing off.
I turn it off from windows 7 also. I don't know why are you so in love with the ugly font smoothing, which makes the fonts appear bloated and fuzzy.
PLEASE APPLE MAKE IT TURN OFF!
Mac mini, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.1)
You can deactivate it. System Preferences > General and deselect Use LCD font smoothing when available
Thanks, I appreciate it, but I know that.
And it doesn't work. It doesn't deactivate it from menu, from XCode pop-up menus, that option is completely useless.
I think Mac fails miserably with fonts, and it just ruins an otherwise good OS.
It doesn't look as bad on retina displays, but that's only because you have twice as many pixels to work with.
And still it bloats the fonts unnecessarily.
It's just ugly.
I was so mad with fonts, I wanted to write my own kerner driver just to turn smoothing off.
It's just horrible, and for a company that takes pride in being the first to bring truetype fonts and graphic user interface, having tasteless fonts is just bad.
Windows also tried to follow you, they added an ugly Segoe font and some other font to their Outlook. Luckily I can redirect them into Arial or Verdana through registry. With Mac it's really built into their OS. This ugly Lucida Grande... What's so nice about this font?
I may sound like I am trashing or ranting, but I speak this way in hopes that somebody notices and makes a normal update to the otherwise normal OS. Their font is just ugly. It looks ugly. There is nothing nice about the way Mac makes fonts smoothing. It would be much better off if it could have been turned off.
Just because the developers of Mac OS is used to seing their font uglyfied by smoothing, and sees no harm in it, doesn't mean everybody shares their preferences. I am a developer too, and I also produce software for sale, It's the user who they should listen, they will be surprised to learn how wrong they are...
Dan
Seriously what is it with font smoothing? Pixelized fonts are ten times easier to read especially on modern displays. Even when you turn off font smoothing by going to System Preferences > General it still applies some level of font smoothing. I wish I could have a face to face talk with the idiot that promoted the idea of using font smoothing in OSX or in any OS. By the way font smoothing tricks the brain into thinking that the vision needs a focal adjustment that is forcing the eye to constantly adjust up and down. It is the cause of migraines and accelerates aging of optical nerves. Features like that should never be imposed to the users it is too much of an annoyance, really!
I have to agree. It's particularly annoying in XCode. It used to render crisp, non-smoothed text which was excellent for working on code, but I can't seem to get it to do that anymore. Very dissappointing. I have to use a larger font now to relieve the strain (I'm not that old!), which wastes screen realestate.
I immediately noticed that in BBEdit the fonts are way too bold after moving to ML from SL. Very distracting.
I ran the following terminal commands and it seems to help:
This reduces the smoothing to the "light" level:
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 1
The default value is 2. You can change is back by running the above command with a 2.
This should turn off all pixel sub-rendering:
defaults write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0
You should be able to reverse this by using a 1 in place of the 0
YMMV...
I strongly agree with the complaints above on font smoothing. On my computer, the problem began with an upgrade from OS 10.5._ to 10.6.8—primarily in Word documents (which I spend most of my work day reading and editing). I've never tried Terminal, but will check the fix suggested above by wqerwqerwqerwqerunless another Apple Discussions user recommends against it.
Followup:
The second Terminal command recommended by wqerwqerwqerwqer on March 11, 2013 seems to have worked. It did not completely stop "font smoothing," but it reduced it.
Has anyone found a solution for this disgrace?
It seems that Apple does not care about the eye health of their users, they do care about making money only.
turn off font smoothing
