In OS X Snow Leopard, Apple changed the Appearances preferences so that you could either enable sub-pixel rendering (”font smoothing”) when available (i.e. if it detects that you are using an LCD monitor), or completely disable it. However, it can be a bit buggy, and often incorrectly recognises your LCD monitor as a CRT, thereby disabling sub-pixel rendering for fonts in newly started applications. Aside from the fact that it makes one’s eyes bleed, it’s also extremely irritating when half of your applications have sub-pixel rendering enabled – and the other half don’t. Let me give you an example:
With sub-pixel rendering enabled
Without sub-pixel rendering enabled
Not nice. Fortunately the fix isn’t too hard; a single command in Terminal:
defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2
This command simply tells OS X to always use medium sub-pixel rendering, whether or not it thinks it is available. It’s fairly safe to just “set and forget”, as people very rarely use CRTs. Hopefully Apple will fix this bug properly, however, and this hack will no longer be needed.
