How to Optimize and Troubleshoot Font Smoothing in Mac OS X

If you think a Mac display looks fuzzy or blurry there are a few common solutions to check into before assuming the screen itself has a problem. Likewise, if your screen text just doesn’t look right it may be due to a few settings within OS X. With that in mind here are a couple tips to troubleshoot a Mac screen that appears blurry, and also how to optimize font smoothing in OS X to make antialiased text look its best on your display.

Choosing the Proper Display Resolution

By default Macs always use the best optimal screen resolution, but it’s the kind of thing that could be changed accidentally or by a previous owner or user who forgot to change it back to the native resolution. This makes a giant difference in how smooth onscreen fonts and items look, here is how to set the proper resolution for your Mac:

1. Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu and choose “Displays”
2. Under the “Display” tab, choose the highest resolution available in the list – for LCD displays that is the native resolution

Here is an example of the dramatic difference that using the proper screen resolution makes:

Compare that picture to the next one:

Make Sure Font Smoothing is Enabled

The next thing you’ll want to do is to make sure you have antialiasing enabled. This is turned on by default but it’s possible someone turned it off and is worse checking:

1. Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu and click “General”
2. At the bottom of the preference panel, check the box next to “Use LCD font smoothing when available”
3. Consider adjusting the minimum font smoothing size, 8 is the default setting and tends to look best on most monitors

For most users the above tips are enough, but you can go a bit further to tweak antialiasing if you’re comfortable using defaults write commands.

Changing the Strength of Font Smoothing in OS X

Finally, it’s a bit more advanced but there is a way to change the font smoothing settings with defaults write commands entered through the Terminal. This used to be available in the System Preferences but Apple has simplified the setting and chooses an option for you now.

Medium font smoothing:
defaults -currentHost read -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

Light font smoothing:
defaults -currentHost read -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 1

Strong font smoothing:
defaults -currentHost read -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 3

You can reverse any of these font smoothing adjustments with the following defaults command:

defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing

Share this: