[USNA91]

Another Newbie question:

Here I am happily playing with my Mac, but I must admit that I am EXTREMELY disappointed in the screen quality while web surfing.

I feel as if I need to get glasses. The font smoothing is so awful, and if I turn it off it looks like crap.

I spoke to Mac support and they told me they have received numerous complaints about the lack of sharp font resolution in OS X, but there's nothing to be done about it yet.

I have tried everything from font size to turning smoothing on and off at different sizes. NOTHING makes the problem better.

I bought this thing in part because I was amazed at how well it reproduced video and graphics. Are you telling me it can't reproduce TEXT? WTF?

And if I'm doing something wrong, or if I haven't tried something, PLEASE tell me, as this is one of only three complaints I have with OSX (The other two are how the toolbars in MS Office float around by themselves, and my desire to see a MUCH better dock and menu bar. I'm afraid Win XP has Mac beat in that regard).

I still love the hardware and the overall seamlessness of the OS, but DAMN this is pissing me off!

[TETENAL]

You can try different font smoothing settings � from light to strong. Nota bene that you need to quit and restart your applications for the settings change to take effect.

Some people like Quartz text smoothing, others detest it. It better reflects the printed appearance of text compared to OS 9 and Windows and personally I like it.

The higher the resolution of your display is, the lower is the effect of text anti-aliasing. Getting a Cinema HD display will resolve the issue for you.

[Chuckit]

How the text smoothing looks depends largely on the monitor. It looks beautiful for me. What kind of monitor do you have, and what is your text smoothing set to?

[BuonRotto]

Go to the System Preferences from the Apple menu. Then go to the Appearance pane. At the bottom, if it says "Standard (Best for CRT)," change it to "Medium (Best for LCD)."

For some reason, even though Apple makes only computers and monitors with LCD flat panels except for the eMac, the CRT anti-aliasing mode is the default.

[Thinine]

Which version of OS X are you using and what type of monitor do you have? Have you calibrated the monitor? Answer these question and we can help you out.

[USNA91]

I am running OS 10.3.6. I am using my laptop screen, which I have set as follows:

Resolution: 1280 x 854
Colors: Millions
Brightness: Maximum
Font Smooting: Medium (Best for Flat-Panel)
Text Smoothing turned off for 4 and under. (Larger than that, and my usual sites look like crap).

Thanks!

[Sharky K.]

can you post a screenshot?

[f1000]

Originally posted by USNA91:
Here I am happily playing with my Mac, but I must admit that I am EXTREMELY disappointed in the screen quality while web surfing.

By the way, have you calibrated your display? Doing so may improve the contrast of text on a white background.

[Catfish_Man]

Another problem is that text rendering is extremely subjective. A good summary, along with some interesting info, can be found here: (although it was down the last time I checked) http://daringfireball.net/2003/11/pa...text_rendering

[smithz4096]

usna91,

your problem is my problem and it can't be solved until apple decides to integrate top-notch hinting into their font-rendering engine/fonts.

All methods mentioned here doesn't cure the problem. Apple's AA is not offering proper hinting, period. Other font-renderers like e.g. Freetype2 offer way better (user choosable) hinting, showing crisper and constant quality rendered chars.

If you examine a screenshot of OS-X with a magnifier tool you can see that each char is rendered slightly different. That leads to non-optimal readability. Sad, but true. A proper hinting algorithm avoids this and renders each char the same.

Apples AA-Prefs just change the strength of smoothing (and subpixel AA) but the blurryness stays. I use a "high res" lcd (106dpi), but the blurryness is driving me nuts.

I also experienced that a CRT can be more forgiving bc. it re-smoothes all that smoothed text a bit more so you won't recognize it so much. :-/ (this is NO solution, i know)

I would say at 200dpi screens this issue is gone. It's a long way to 200dpi.

Maybe in 10.6 ?

ps.those daring fireball article is really missing the point IMHO. It describes how the AA has improved in Panther. The main issue isn't the AA itself, but the poor implementation of OS-X AA without any hinting options. I'm not against AA, but against Apples approach.

[USNA91]

Woooooooooonderful.......

Well, I seem to be adapting to it, and I will try (again) calibrating my display. As for the posted article, I just glanced at it and it seems chock full of good stuff, so off I go to read it in detail.

Thanks!

[Visnaut]

I find it so interesting how such things can be so subjective. I myself use only LCD monitors (cause me much less eye fatigue) and I love the "Standard (Best for CRT)" setting. Any of the LCD-specific settings drive me nuts. And yes, I've calibrated my monitors and the like. It's just that my eyes pick up the individual colors of the pixels but can't focus on them and it makes 'em go bonkers. Plus, when the text is inverted, like white on black, they look unnaturally bolded.

And personally, I can't wrap my brain around the fact that people view it as being "blurry". I just see much softer, well-rendered characters. Personally I can't stand the way Windows either leaves text all blocky or half-heartedly anti-aliased. But hey, all this does is serve as an interesting social experiment to expose how different people perceive the world differently.

[bborofka]

I've found that using Standard (Best for CRT) is the best quality smoothing. I wouldn't use anything other than that, unless I was on a Mac with a really bad LCD, like a G4 iMac or something, where Standard simply becomes unreadable.

USNA91, try changing the setting to Standard in System Preferences > Appearance.

[smithz4096]

Originally posted by Visnaut:
Any of the LCD-specific settings drive me nuts. And yes, I've calibrated my monitors and the like. It's just that my eyes pick up the individual colors of the pixels but can't focus on them and it makes 'em go

me too, those blue and orange fuzzy borders wreck my brain.

[Boondoggle]

Originally posted by Visnaut:
I find it so interesting how such things can be so subjective. I myself use only LCD monitors (cause me much less eye fatigue) and I love the "Standard (Best for CRT)" setting. Any of the LCD-specific settings drive me nuts. And yes, I've calibrated my monitors and the like. It's just that my eyes pick up the individual colors of the pixels but can't focus on them and it makes 'em go bonkers. Plus, when the text is inverted, like white on black, they look unnaturally bolded.

And personally, I can't wrap my brain around the fact that people view it as being "blurry". I just see much softer, well-rendered characters. Personally I can't stand the way Windows either leaves text all blocky or half-heartedly anti-aliased. But hey, all this does is serve as an interesting social experiment to expose how different people perceive the world differently.

This could just be a convoluted way to figure out who needs new glasses...

[powermacj7]

The only Mac I had trouble with was my G3 iMac. The contrast control is under the hood, and you had to remove it to adjust it. Never understood why Apple put it there. Even to this day, that screen bothers my eyes. Since then, I have had LCD displays, and would never go back to CRT. My powerbook dvi has a nice screen, and I am pleased with the fonts and colors.

[Apfhex]

Originally posted by smithz4096:
me too, those blue and orange fuzzy borders wreck my brain.

The colors messed with me too until I used the "Best for LCD" setting a while on my PowerBook and go used to it, now I don't see the colors anymore (unless I take a screenshot and zoom in ).

Honestly, if the text were any significant amount sharper on my screen it would hurt my eyes or at least be too thin and hard to read. Just getting used to the high contrast/sharpness of an LCD was enough for me (of course now I can't go back to CRT). I think the font smoothing is so very much more attractive than XP's (which is so little sometimes that it seems there's none at all), but we've already been through the argument of how subjective this all is...

[themexican]

I assume you have your computer set at native resolution. It's surprising how many people with flat panel screens have their screens set to the wrong resolution and wonder why text looks terrible.

But even with your resolution set correctly, you still might hate the way text is rendered. There have been a million discussions of this on these boards over the years, basically it comes down to the fact that some people hate OS X's font smoothing. I'm one of those people. After years of looking at it, it still looks fuzzy to me when compared to text on a PC.

This is what I do to minimize the issue.

1. I actually turn off font smoothing. at sizes less than 12 points. I prefer crisp unsmoothed fonts to blurry smoothed ones.

2. I set Safari to never use fonts smaller than 9 points. This way there are never any illegible 7 or 8 point fonts.

3. I wait and keep hoping Apple will improve things!

Having been a mac user since 1984 and an OS X user since the days of the first beta, font handling (not just smoothing, but also management of fonts, and inconsistent Carbon/Cocoa rendereing) is easily my number one gripe with OS X.

Anyway the issue is highly subjective (I can look at something and think it looks terrible while some other guy can think it looks great), emotional (just look at some of the other threads that go on forever), and not likely to be resolved soon because there is no right or wrong answer.

[Mr Heliums]

It's also worth pointing out that font rendering in Microsoft products on the Mac is fairly poor. Try testing a Cocoa-based text editor, such as Nisus Writer Express or even TextEdit. Do these look any better?

[USNA91]

Originally posted by Mr Heliums:
It's also worth pointing out that font rendering in Microsoft products on the Mac is fairly poor. Try testing a Cocoa-based text editor, such as Nisus Writer Express or even TextEdit. Do these look any better?

Nope. All the same.

[mAxximo]

Originally posted by themexican:
Anyway the issue is highly subjective (I can look at something and think it looks terrible while some other guy can think it looks great), emotional (just look at some of the other threads that go on forever), and not likely to be resolved soon because there is no right or wrong answer. [/B]

There actually IS a right answer. Just look at a real Mac or at a Windows machine for a minute and compare the way text looks with OS X. The bluriness in Apple's system is ridiculous. They can't simply do anything about it for the same reason they can't make the rest of the system work as it should: they are just not capable. Not anymore.

[cpac]

don't feed the troll.

[BuonRotto]

bitter, bitter. It's not your company anyway.

[smithz4096]

1. I actually turn off font smoothing. at sizes less than 12 points. I prefer crisp unsmoothed fonts to blurry smoothed ones.

I do that, too. It's a tragedy, because the resulting bitmaps are indeed crisp, but (again) not very good. They are mediocre at best. The lousy hinting is still present in the resulting bitmap-fonts.

And you're right: All we can do is wait Wait for Apple to deliver anything acceptable or for displays at 200dpi.

My guess is displays will be ready faster...

[gizmoX]

Originally posted by cpac:don't feed the troll.
Originally posted by BuonRotto:bitter, bitter. It's not your company anyway.

huh? aren't you guys slightly off topic now? I see nothing but the painful truth in these posts - spiced up with constructive frustration. Pretending that these text rendering problem doesn't exist won't get us anywhere.
.

[JKT]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
There actually IS a right answer. Just look at a real Mac or at a Windows machine for a minute and compare the way text looks with OS X. The bluriness in Apple's system is ridiculous. They can't simply do anything about it for the same reason they can't make the rest of the system work as it should: they are just not capable. Not anymore.

cpac was referring to this troll, not the original poster.

[ul1984]

i too use the "Standard - best for CRT" rendering on my 15" PB LCD, looks much much better compared to subpixel rendering.

and i set Safari's minimum font size to 12, fonts smaller then 12 looks ugly to me, there just isnt enough pixels to properly display them. (exception: Monaco size 10, unantialiased in my Terminal.app)

with these settings it looks great to me

[cpac]

Originally posted by gizmoX:
huh? aren't you guys slightly off topic now? I see nothing but the painful truth in these posts - spiced up with constructive frustration. Pretending that these text rendering problem doesn't exist won't get us anywhere.
.

I was referring to the troll who posted above me.

I personally find text rendering and font smoothing on my TiBook 500 to be excellent and only turn it on for fonts as small as it will go. This "problem" may be a matter of personal preference, in which case you might want to call on Apple to provide more options, but it's not like it's a bug or some feature that's broken or anything.

FWIW, Adobe Reader/Acrobat offer a greater range of font smoothing options in its display preferences - you might want to open a .pdf in Adobe and see if you can get things to appear better to you than Apple's native settings allow - then you'd have some constructive information to provide Apple, (or the rest of us for comparison).

[mAxximo]

Cry troll all you want, it's STILL the painful truth.

[mAxximo]

Originally posted by cpac:
I personally find text rendering and font smoothing on my TiBook 500 to be excellent and only turn it on for fonts as small as it will go. This "problem" may be a matter of personal preference, in which case you might want to call on Apple to provide more options, but it's not like it's a bug or some feature that's broken or anything.

The Apologist's Book, page 1.

[SMacTech]

Go back to Arstechnica and troll, oh wait...

[USNA91]

Well, I went into Mozilla Firefox and set the minimum font size to 11, then changed all the fonts to Arial (a favorite of mine). The results are MUCH better, although some web sites look kinda funny now!

For the record, I'm really surprised that the PB 15-inch screen has such a lower resolution than my HP Pavilion. I would have expected better. Still, I'm no expert, and the data I'm going on is strictly the pixel numbers, so maybe there is something else that offsets this which I'm not aware of.

Either way, every time the lights go out and the screen dims and the keyboard backlights, I just smile and say, "Wow......"

Makes it all worthwhile!

[kcmac]

I use a PC (XP) and a Mac (Panther). I just never for the life of me can figure out how this argument starts.

Fonts just plain look like crap in Outlook, IE, etc. on the PC. That is with ClearType activated. (Which BTW is an option buried DEEP in the control panel.)

I have made this comparison at my office many times with both machines side by side. I have never had anyone look at them both at once and not agree.

I obviously just don't get it.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
Cry troll all you want, it's STILL the painful truth.

s/truth/opinion

Strangely, not everyone in the world agrees with you on everything.

[CaptainHaddock]

Just to chime in with my own suggestions as a new Mac user:

1. Try setting the anti-aliasing options to "Light". That looks the most crisp on my 20" LCD.

2. Change your browser default font settings to use sans-serif fonts. Small serif fonts look poor on any monitor.

3. Use the Cmd-plus keyboard shortcut to enlarge website fonts whenever they're too small - which is frequent, because sites designed for IE:Windows usually cater to that browser's goofy font sizes.

4. Like someone suggested, calibrate your display colours. If you know a talented artist with a good eye for matching colours, get him to help you.

5. Thank the good Lord you don't have to use Windows, which is far worse.

Personally, I think Apple's font-smoothing technology is great, but there's still room for improvement. In fact, Linux has the nicest screen anti-aliasing I've seen, and since that code is open-source, it would be easy to integrate.

[gizmoX]

Originally posted by cpac: I personally find text rendering and font smoothing on my TiBook 500 to be excellent and only turn it on for fonts as small as it will go. This "problem" may be a matter of personal preference, in which case you might want to call on Apple to provide more options, but it's not like it's a bug or some feature that's broken or anything.

ok, so you're happy with your Mac and everything about it - witch is great, and you're ofc free to say so. You're free to publish your personal opinion, as everyone else should be free to publish theirs.

Originally posted by mAxximo: There actually IS a right answer. Just look at a real Mac or at a Windows machine for a minute and compare the way text looks with OS X. The bluriness in Apple's system is ridiculous. They can't simply do anything about it for the same reason they can't make the rest of the system work as it should: they are just not capable. Not anymore.

This guy is not rude, nor is he using any bad words. He's just saying what he believe is the truth - expressing his personal opinion, does that really make him a troll?!

btw - I'm glad to know that the very shifting text rendering quality in OSX isn't caused by a bug or some broken feature
.

[K++]

Originally posted by smithz4096:
usna91,

your problem is my problem and it can't be solved until apple decides to integrate top-notch hinting into their font-rendering engine/fonts.

They already have, as is eveidenced by the fact that the text rendering in OS X is largely regarded as the best there is and Panther's updates improved it further to maintian the shape of the actual glyphs better.

All methods mentioned here doesn't cure the problem. Apple's AA is not offering proper hinting, period. Other font-renderers like e.g. Freetype2 offer way better (user choosable) hinting, showing crisper and constant quality rendered chars.

Freetype2 is nowhere near as nice as the text smoothing on OS X, though I should admit that font smoothing is subjective in and of itself. ALL Linux font smoothing is garbage as I have seen, sure they make the text look better than it would naked, but none of it is anywhere near OS X. The only difference is that you are allowed to choose how you want the text hinted.

If you examine a screenshot of OS-X with a magnifier tool you can see that each char is rendered slightly different. That leads to non-optimal readability. Sad, but true. A proper hinting algorithm avoids this and renders each char the same.

The hinting is once again correct on OS X as the glyphs used for the letters aren't necessarily the same everytime they are used, fonts often have special glyphs for letters depending on where they are in relation to other letters.

Apples AA-Prefs just change the strength of smoothing (and subpixel AA) but the blurryness stays. I use a "high res" lcd (106dpi), but the blurryness is driving me nuts.

"Strength of smoothing"? What are you talking about? As to the monitor: what monitor is that? is that at native resolution? are you using it's native resolution? and where was this number quoted to you?

I also experienced that a CRT can be more forgiving bc. it re-smoothes all that smoothed text a bit more so you won't recognize it so much. :-/ (this is NO solution, i know)

Monitors merely display whatever you give them, they don't have magic postfilters for determining where text is and then prettying them up for you. As to the whole Monitors thing, its obvious this is a monitor issue since my Apple Studio Display has gorgeous text on it's screen and nothing else comes close to the gorgeousness on my screen. I did have the pleasure of hooking a PowerBook up to a JVC tv to watch a DVD and however it determined that I was using a JVC TV is beyond me, but it calibrated itself and gave me gorgeous text rendering yet again. I decided to instant message from that screen to take a closer look at the text I was seeing, and I repeat it was gorgeous. A tad larger than I'm used to seeing text, but gorgeous nonetheless.

I would say at 200dpi screens this issue is gone. It's a long way to 200dpi.

Where are you getting these figures from? I can't find this info for any monitors, is there some special guide that has these numbers?

ps.those daring fireball article is really missing the point IMHO. It describes how the AA has improved in Panther. The main issue isn't the AA itself, but the poor implementation of OS-X AA without any hinting options. I'm not against AA, but against Apples approach.

I don't see how it missed the point at all, it acknowledge the AA was awesome and that some people don't like it, but for them there is nothing to do. You keep talking about the poor implementation, but all the people who aren't bitching about it regard it as the best available and those who use Windows's cleartype agree. ClearType mangles text forms, OS X's AA will never do that since one of its core demographics are artists, for whom fonts and the shape of those fonts means everything.

[Spliffdaddy]

ClearType was designed for LCDs only. And it's globally regarded as the best available.

Let the fight continue...

[MartiNZ]

ClearType makes the word 'start' on the start menu not look jagged as it does with that turned off. Apart from that it's not clear, ironically, quite what it does - text in Word and such looks pretty nasty compared to that in OS X if you ask me .

[Thinine]

Whether you like it or not, Apple's antialiasing most closely resembles printed text, which is the point of antialiasing. Until higher density displays (150 dpi) become more common, antialiasing will have to do.

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by Spliffdaddy:
ClearType was designed for LCDs only. And it's globally regarded as the best available.

By whom? Sure, it's relatively crisp, but I think it makes fonts look funky.

[JKT]

Spot the difference:



FWIW, anything other than standard does the same thing as ClearType - sub-pixel rendering, which has the consequence of giving blue and red edges to the text. These colour shifts are far more apparent on a CRT than they are on an LCD which is why you shouldn't really use them on a CRT.

P.S. If you have the Developer tools installed, the app to see this sort of thing with is Pixie.

[cpac]

Originally posted by gizmoX:
ok, so you're happy with your Mac and everything about it - witch is great, and you're ofc free to say so. You're free to publish your personal opinion, as everyone else should be free to publish theirs.This guy is not rude, nor is he using any bad words. He's just saying what he believe is the truth - expressing his personal opinion, does that really make him a troll?!

I expressed my opinion as an opinion.

Yes, even trolls have personal opinions, but those opinions are usually expressed as "truths" and written in a way meant to provoke heated discussion on unrelated topics.

Trolling != using "bad" words.

The gentleman I'm calling a troll posted things like:

They can't simply do anything about it for the same reason they can't make the rest of the system work as it should: they are just not capable. Not anymore.

Which is exactly how you start trolling.

[K++]

Actually, it is very connected to monitor. While on my Apple Studio Display the text does look gorgeous, I recall looking over one girls shoulder as she was using Adium on her newer model PowerBook and seeing the worst text I have ever seen, I immediately thought that something was wrong with her screen and was surprised to hear her say her text normally looks like this.

I personally would have long returned it, but she continued as if that text was normal, so its obviously connected to the monitor.

[smithz4096]

Originally posted by K++:
[B]They already have, as is eveidenced by the fact that the text rendering in OS X is largely regarded as the best there is and Panther's updates improved it further to maintian the shape of the actual glyphs better.

"the best" ... before panther text-rendering was horrible, now it's at least acceptable.
And i don't care about mass opinion, i care about facts.

Freetype2 is nowhere near as nice as the text smoothing on OS X, though I should admit that font smoothing is subjective in and of itself. ALL Linux font smoothing is garbage

Simply wrong. No facts. Linux doesn't do font smoothing, the type-renderer does. Freetype2, as linux, is free and open - so it can do wonderful but also horrible stuff, it just depends on the settings / fonts.

And btw, you call the rendered fonts in this screenshot garbage? http://www.smithz.org/x/15607-1.png

Please, just look at the fonts, i'm not discussing the UI design.

The hinting is once again correct on OS X as the glyphs used for the letters aren't

It's a bit complicated, bc. i talk about "hard" hinting, that results in chars fit in the pixel grid most of the time. That leads to excellent readability because the native resolution of the display is used to the max.

"Strength of smoothing"? What are you talking about? As to the monitor: what monitor is that? is that at native resolution? are you using it's native resolution? and where was this number quoted to you?

NOT AGAIN! Of course i use the native res. By "strength of smoothing" i mean that prefs for AA in OS X. The number i quoted is the approx. res of my screen, i read it somewhere. 12" ibook showing 1024*768 is approx. 106dpi. (it may be a little less or more, but around 100 as most Displays used on Apple Machines). If you're good at mathematics you can calculate your monitor-dpi.

Where are you getting these figures from? I can't find this info for any monitors, is there some special guide that has these numbers?

Sorry, I don't have a link here, but it's obvious that if monitor-resolutions rise above 200dpi (dots per inch) you can't spot single pixels anymore, so a slightly blurry AA isn't a problem anymore. Apple waits for this going to happen instead of getting the max out of current displays.

You keep talking about the poor implementation, but all the people who aren't bitching about it regard it as the best available and those who use Windows's cleartype agree. ClearType mangles text forms

Every char renderer mangles text forms, at least at small sizes. XP does this very agressive, sure. The readability is IMHO better for small chars, and that's all i care about.

And again, I care about facts, not about mass opinion of OS X users. Please notice that some people simply doesn't know that crispier rendering technologies exist.

And last, I know people get used to things, to nearly anything, so this discussion leads nowhere.
But anyone who is still interested, have a look at this: http://smithz.org/x/os-x-blurryhell-beta.gif
It visually describes the problem I and other enthusiasts have with OS X.

[smithz4096]

Originally posted by CaptainHaddock:
Personally, I think Apple's font-smoothing technology is great, but there's still room for improvement. In fact, Linux has the nicest screen anti-aliasing I've seen, and since that code is open-source, it would be easy to integrate.

Oh yeah Captain Haddock, that's the point. Friggin' open-source, Apple - WHY WAIT ? Too proud?

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by smithz4096:
Oh yeah Captain Haddock, that's the point. Friggin' open-source, Apple - WHY WAIT ? Too proud?

Open source != free to take.

[mAxximo]

Originally posted by cpac:
I expressed my opinion as an opinion.

Yes, even trolls have personal opinions, but those opinions are usually expressed as "truths" and written in a way meant to provoke heated discussion on unrelated topics.

The worst troll is calling someone else a troll because his opinions differ to yours, which is exactly what you're doing.
No post in this thread have caused more harm and OT messages than your whining because (oh, LORD!) someone dared to criticise Apple/OS X. Thus the troll is you.

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by mAxximo:
The worst troll is calling someone else a troll because his opinions differ to yours, which is exactly what you're doing.
No post in this thread have caused more harm and OT messages than your whining because (oh, LORD!) someone dared to criticise Apple/OS X. Thus the troll is you.

I take it that by "dared to criticize apple/OS X," you mean "launched personal attacks against Apple's engineers and called those who hold a different opinion apologists." Which, in fact, is somewhat trollish. Especially considering you did all this in your first few posts. Do you see where the "troll" label is coming from?

[mAxximo]

Originally posted by Chuckit:
I take it that by "dared to criticize apple/OS X," you mean "launched personal attacks against Apple's engineers"

O-h-M-y-G-o-d
Please tell me it was a joke.