{"id":22090,"date":"2018-07-13T14:33:56","date_gmt":"2018-07-13T18:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=22090"},"modified":"2018-11-12T15:31:58","modified_gmt":"2018-11-12T20:31:58","slug":"macos-10-14-mojave-removes-subpixel-anti-aliasing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2018\/07\/13\/macos-10-14-mojave-removes-subpixel-anti-aliasing\/","title":{"rendered":"macOS 10.14 Mojave Removes Subpixel Anti-aliasing"},"content":{"rendered":"

seelus<\/a> (Hacker News<\/a>, Reddit<\/a>):<\/p>\n

For anyone who wants to see whats coming when Mojave gets released without subpixel AA, I made a few comparison screenshots on a non-Retina display[…]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Peter Ammon<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Subpixel antialiasing is obnoxious to implement. It requires threading physical pixel geometry up through multiple graphics layers, geometry which is screen-dependent (think multi-monitor). It multiplies your glyph caches: glyph * subpixel offset. It requires knowing your foreground and background colors at render time, which is an unnatural requirement when you want to do GPU-accelerated compositing. There’s tons of ways to fall off of the subpixel antialiased quality path, and there’s weird graphical artifacts when switching from static to animated text, or the other way. What a pain!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

This seems like a good engineering trade-off: simplify the code and testing, since the future is Retina. I say this as someone using an external 1x display. However, I’ve never liked seeing the colored pixels. I think text looks better with “Use LCD font smoothing when available” off and “Increase contrast” on. The worst part was that, no matter whether LCD font smoothing was enabled, there were always inconsistencies between different windows (even within the same app). That should no longer be a problem now.<\/p>\n\n

Previously: Removed in macOS 10.14 Mojave<\/a>, Mavericks Font Smoothing<\/a>, Layer-backed Text Rendering<\/a>, Anti-Aliasing in Leopard’s Menu Bar<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Update (2018-07-16): Colin Cornaby<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

No idea what they did, but text does seem improved on Mojave B4. I can’t tell if it’s as good as subpixel AA, but it’s no longer offensive to my eyes.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Update (2018-11-12): Steve Sande<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Depending on the Mac’s display and your personal preference, you may find that text looks “better” to you when font smoothing is disabled by unchecking the box, or vice versa. The enabled setting provides a somewhat more bold-looking font with more anti-aliasing (smoothing jagged edges on curved lines and diagonals).<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

This last method provides a manual way to change the strength of font smoothing settings in macOS. Depending on whether you wish to have light, medium or strong font smoothing enabled, enter one of the following commands in Terminal, press Return, and then log out and back in or reboot the Mac.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

seelus (Hacker News, Reddit): For anyone who wants to see whats coming when Mojave gets released without subpixel AA, I made a few comparison screenshots on a non-Retina display[…] Peter Ammon: Subpixel antialiasing is obnoxious to implement. It requires threading physical pixel geometry up through multiple graphics layers, geometry which is screen-dependent (think multi-monitor). It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2018-07-20T13:58:43Z","apple_news_api_id":"9d2a1190-825c-47c8-8e58-4935403dac91","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2018-11-12T20:32:01Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAg==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AnSoRkIJcR8iOWEk1QD2skQ","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[104,30,1529,83,1227],"class_list":["post-22090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-fontsmoothing","tag-mac","tag-macos-10-13","tag-retina","tag-top-posts"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22090"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23347,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22090\/revisions\/23347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}