Subpixel rendering mac os x

Fortunately, with a little effort you can make some adjustments to how MacOS Mojave handles font smoothing and anti-aliasing which may improve the appearance of text and fonts on your Mac screen. These font smoothing settings are not recommended to change on a Retina display Mac, though if you feel like doing so you certainly can experiment with the settings on a Retina Mac as well, if you do then please report your experiences in the comments below.

The real solution

The first is quite simple through a preference panel, but the latter options are more advanced and require using the Terminal. You can use any or all of them, and how each appears will differ depending on your particular Mac and the screens you use and your personal preferences and perhaps eyesight. You might instantly see a difference in simply toggling that setting on or off, and that alone may resolve the issues you are experiencing with fonts in Mojave.

This particular change was extremely subtle for my particular Mac, screen shots in animated GIF form attempt to capture the difference with the thicker bolder font the result after the defaults command was issued and the thinner version before:. Again some Mac users may notice this change alone is sufficient to remedy any complaints they have about font blurriness, fuzziness, font weight or text being too thin or hard to read.

But for some Mac users they still may have complaints, in which case you can also go further to manually adjust anti-aliasing settings in Mac OS.

Comparison:

Next you can also manually attempt to change the strength of font smoothing settings anti-aliasing in Mac OS , this also relies on defaults commands entered into the Terminal. Strong font smoothing defaults command: Medium font smoothing defaults command: Light font smoothing defaults command: How obvious or subtle the changes will be for you depends on your Mac, the display in use, and perhaps even individual preference and eyesight.

Thus if you have any issue with the way fonts appear in macOS Mojave you might want to try each of the settings individually to find what works best for you. This command will remove any custom font smoothing setting: This command will revert the change to rendering font smoothing settings back to the default in macOS Mojave:. All of this may or may not apply to you and your particular Mac, screen, and display, but the cause if this does apply to you is apparently due to a change in how macOS Mojave handles font rendering and anti-aliasing.

Variations of this tip have been covered here at OSXDaily. These changes to font smoothing were first noticed during the beta period of Mojave, but persist today. Thanks to dev. Enjoy this tip? Subscribe to the OSXDaily newsletter to get more of our great Apple tips, tricks, and important news delivered to your inbox! Enter your email address below:. I just updated to Mojave and noticed that Times New Roman 12 pt.

Mac OS X White/Light Text Sub-Pixel Antialiasing Bug

Turning off font smoothing in preferences looks slightly better, but a bit fuzzy. If I use font-smoothing the fonts look better on a white background, if I turn it off they look better on a dark one. Windows used to have a font optimizer that one can run and be presented with various font rendering options, so they can pick the one that looks best on the particular display. OS X needs something like that. Thanks again. I used this command and confirmed that enabled Font Smoothing in settings, it was already enabled for me and logged out and in and the fonts look much better:.

I guess this means Apple will soon only sell retina displays for Mac? Join , subscribers and get a daily digest of news, geek trivia, and our feature articles. On a MacBook Air or a desktop Mac hooked up to a non-Retina display, upgrading will make your fonts look worse. Open a Terminal and run the following command:. Log out and log back in for your changes to take effect. Thanks to Dean Herbert for reporting this to us. Subpixel antialiasing is a trick designed to make fonts look better on lower-resolution displays. Without this feature enabled by default, macOS Mojave makes text look thinner and more blurry on non-Retina displays.

Note that you need to re-launch apps for the change to take effect. Here above we see the way sub-pixel AA is supposed to work, and it does work well. It makes for a slight improvement because of the increased "resolution" that the sub-pixels give you. It's particularly noticeable on diagonals v, w, y and curves a, e, o, p, s. The price you pay is only a very slight, practically unnoticeable color fringing at the edges.

Most importantly, the effect is only subtle — it improves but doesn't drastically change the look of the text from its natural form without sub-pixel AA. This is correct behavior. Here above we see the bug. As a result, the sub-pixel AA'd edges which would fade into the background on white end up "fattening" the letters, making them all look heavier. For normal text gray, lower , the result makes the text look almost bold. For the top paragraph, which really is bold, the buggy sub-pixel AA makes it look super-bold.

The sub-pixel AA is accidentally making major, drastic changes to the way the text looks, which it doesn't do in the normal black-text-on-white cases. Now you might say the right version looks better, and I agree. There IS a good case for slightly fattening small lettering when it's light and the background is dark, to make it more readable. Perhaps Mac OS X should do that for small text sizes.

That would be a logical choice, and apply no matter which AA mode is chosen. But that's not what's happening here. This is not an intentional thing — if it were, the left version would also be heavier.

How to Fix Blurry Fonts in MacOS Mojave for Non-Retina Displays

Here above is a more severe example, taken from the HardOCP web site. All of the text now looks bold if sub-pixel AA is on, and the bold heading looks super-bold. This example above, taken from the Tech Report web site , and the previous, take one of the biggest hits from this bug, since they use quite large text so they don't really benefit from any accidental fattening of the letters. It just looks like the whole site is bold which it isn't.

Note that you can reduce the degree of the bug by choosing "light" sub-pixel AA in the Appearance preference pane, but that doesn't completely eliminate it.

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And of course, it reduces the effectiveness of sub-pixel AA in the common, black-text-on-white-background case. So let's not just imagine what might be going wrong at the sub-pixel level — let's really check it out. Here's an extreme close-up of the letter "d", in both cases white and black backgrounds.