Risk för sämre kantutjämning i Snow Leopard

Do fonts look like crap on your shiny new copy of snow leopard?

That’s probably because Snow Leopard now relies on your monitor to tell your machine that it’s an LCD. Unfortunately, many LCDs including both of my Dell displays don’t do this. So you get no sub-pixel anti-aliasing. Bad times.

But don’t fret. There is a solution. Open up a terminal window and type:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

and all will be well again.

There is a bug in Snow Leopard that disables LCD (sub-pixel) font smoothing on many third party LCD displays, including models from Dell, Samsung, LG, HP, EIZO, and Lenovo. Here are the details:

Snow Leopard introduces simplified Font Smoothing options under the Appearance pane in System Preferences. Prior to Snow Leopard, the available options were:

• Automatic - Best for Main Display

• Standard - Best for CRT

• Light

• Medium - Best for Flat Panel

• Strong

In Snow Leopard, you can only choose between Automatic and Standard CRT. Since few people use CRTs these days, most users now have only one option: Automatic. The problem with the Automatic option is that OS X incorrectly detects many third party LCD monitors as CRTs, and consequently, disables LCD font smoothing.

You can force OS X to use LCD font smoothing on all displays with this Terminal command:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

The number 2 here corresponds to Medium - Best for Flat Panel. You may also use 1 for light smoothing, and 3 for strong smoothing, as per the original OS X font smoothing options.