Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Mavericks Font Smoothing

Since updating to Mavericks, I’ve noticed that text is not rendered as crisply. Here are some screenshots showing Verdana in Safari 7:

Mountain Lion

Daring Fireball on Mountain Lion
FogBugz on Mountain Lion

Mavericks

Daring Fireball on Mavericks
FogBugz on Mavericks

It feels harder to read, and compared side-by-side the Mavericks text looks like a fuzzy mush to me.

Related:

Update (2015-03-11): Mike Ash had the same problem with Xcode and multiple displays:

Fixed Xcode’s antialiasing dumbness. Patch -[NSTextView drawRect:], do [[self layoutManager] setUsesScreenFonts: YES];.

I made a hacked Xcode plugin. There’s an undocumented API for that. I might see about cleaning it up and publishing something.

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