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:
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.