Font Smoothing in Snow Leopard
Apple have touted Mac OS X Snow Leopard as having no new features. Whilst there are no new big ticket features there have been plenty of tweaks and refinements. One part that got this treatment was the font smoothing options in System Preferences. In Leopard this allowed you to enable font smoothing and choose between four different levels of smoothing. In Snow Leopard there’s now only a single option to enable the smoothing.
The problem with this change is that is appears to default to the light option. As previously identified in, “Consolas on Mac Update”, my preferred fixed width font Consolas doesn’t look nice with the light smoothing and I prefer medium. Fortunately you can still choose the medium option but setting the preference directly via the defaults command in the Terminal:
Programming Fonts Recap
Dan Benjamin did a review of programming fonts and identified Inconsolata as his favourite of the ten he presented. I tried out Inconsolata after this recommendation but have gone back to Consolas. There were a few things that I didn’t like about Inconsolata: It feels a bit round, it has a weird lowercase ‘t’ that ends up looking bold when the other text isn’t, the ‘i’ looks a bit thin and using left curly quotes all the time looks a bit strange. I also thought the tilde wasn’t defined enough, particularly in a prompt. Being freely available and not having to jump through hoops is certainly a plus though.
A few weeks later Dan posted a follow up post about Anonymous Pro. I personally can’t see what the attraction to that one is. The larger type looks with a mix of upper and lowercase letter appears like two different fonts and ends up looking a total mess to me.
Around the same time as Dan’s second post news broke that Snow Leopard will ship with a new monospaced font called Menlo that will replace the use of Monaco as the default font in applications like Terminal and Xcode. Menlo is derived from DejaVu Sans Mono which is in turn derived from Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Jon Shea from ExpanDrive posted a comparison of Menlo to Bitstream Vera Sans Mono that shows the changes that Apple have made. From this comparison they all look quite sensible. The Vera family has been licensed in a FOSS friendly manner and is included as a system font in many Linux distributions. I’ve also tried Vera Mono for programming in the past but again I still like the feel of Consolas more.
Below is a screen shot of each font (except Menlo, which isn’t widely available yet Menlo screen shot supplied by eric s) in TextMate using my preferred theme, Railscasts. Note that my baseline was Consolas 13pt and I adjusted the others to approximately the same size. The code snippet used is the same as Dan used in his Anonymous Pro post.
Consolas on Mac Update
Today I followed my own directions on installing Consolas on my Mac Pro. The original directions were put together when installing it on my Mac Book. The downloaded disk image had a different volume name, as did the meta package. So the the command I used to launch the font installer was:
open "/Volumes/Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0/Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0.mpkg/Contents/Packages/OpenXML_all_fonts.pkg"
After the installer ran I went about making it the default font in Terminal. After doing so and setting it the same as it was on my Mac Book (13pt, antialiasing on) it looked terrible on the Mac Pro. Compare the two images below. I was after the latter.
After a little bit of confusion I decided to check the font smoothing style in the Appearance preference pane (in System Preferences). Turns out it was set to Automatic (best for main display) on the Mac Pro and Medium (best for Flat Panel) on the Mac Book. Changing to Medium and relaunching Terminal had it looking identical on both machines.
Install Microsoft’s Consolas Font on Mac OS X
With the introduction of Windows Vista and Office 2007 Microsoft included some new fonts, which became the defaults in Office. Their names all start with ‘C’ and they are quite attractive. In particular there is a monospaced font called Consolas that is nice to use as a text editor font and Terminal font. The problem is they aren’t technically free, although Microsoft does include them in a number of freely available updaters. What follows is how I went about installing the fonts on my Mac.