Mac 10.6 LCD Font Smoothing Bug

For anyone out there using Snow Leopard (10.6) on their Mac with a 3rd party monitor (I use Samsung flat panels), you may notice your text seems harder to read. I personally realized that after a few long coding sessions in front of the Mac my eyes started completely bugging out after a few hours. Somehow the fonts never seemed to render right, but I thought I was imagining things. But no, it turns out I wasn’t: there’s a bug in the 10.6 LCD sub-pixel font smoothing setting when using your Mac with certain 3rd party monitors. In the “Appearance” setting, you’ll notice 10.6 has a simplified smoothing setting which simply offers to enable LCD font smoothing if its available. This is different from previous versions which allowed you to set this property manually, and it probably wouldn’t be a problem if it actually worked.

To manually enable it, just use this terminal command:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

As you can see from the picture, this setting makes quite a difference. Well this change is literally a welcome relief for the old eyeballs.

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