Working on tip this sunup , my automobile experience an odd “ soft crash . ” Each software I had open was easy , inexorably , beach - balling . Trying to bide a bit ahead of the curve ball , I give up those that I could , and force fall by the wayside the others that were already spinning off . I was nearly done , and had just chosen Restart when the Finder took a hard tumble and just vanished . The machine then rebooted to the login silver screen .
After login , all seemed hunky-dory , except for the fact that text looked just slightly “ wrong ” to me . It take a while to put my finger on it , but finally I figured out it was the anti - aliasing . The aliasing was too weak , lead to some punishing - to - read fonts , like line four in the small image above . I figured something got messed up in the Appearances preference panel , so I went to take a spirit . The font smoothing pappa - up was still put to Automatic – Best for master display , so that seemed ripe .
Intrigued , I thought I ’d recreate with the font smoothen options for a few minutes ; I had n’t really even reckon at these since the oculus sinister X 10.1 or 10.2 earned run average . So I chose each setting , close up the System Prefs , and then restarted the Finder to make the setting take effect . ( And yes , this last dance step is necessary . campaign apps wo n’t see the newfangled smoothing setting until the next time they ’re launch . ) I found the results interesting , if nothing else . My main blind is one of the original Apple 23 - column inch LCDs , and here ’s a little look at how each setting touched smoothing – snap on the small image below to see the full - size edition :
As you could see , it seems that Automatic on my machine was beak the Standard ( Best for CRT ) setting , chair to the jaggedly text I was seeing . I switched it over to Medium , and now things are back the way they were pre - crash . The tangible question is , though , what exactly does Automatic signify ? I tried visiting Apple help , but all it had to proffer was the ever - so - utilitarian “ Choose a style from the ‘ Font smoothing mode ’ pop - up menu . ”
If your textual matter is looking a bit rough to your eyes , you might want to visit the Appearance panel and give the other choices a quick test effort . Just remember to relaunch the Finder between variety . ( I receive that easiest to do by holding Option and then clicking and holding on the Finder ’s Dock image . When the contextual menu appears , it will include a Relaunch point . )
