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Font smoothing on a retina machine..
- Thread starter MarcusCarpenter
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Everything looks much more sharp to me, reminds me of the early Yosemite Betas before the font was changed
IMO, font smoothing shouldn't even be an option on retina machines... It is a 'hack' that employs certain idiosyncratic physical properties of LCD displays to make the text appear smoother. However, it can't work on the retina display simply because of the behind-the-scene resampling that the OS does to the images when running in a scaled mode. And the granularity of pixels on a retina display is small enough to make font smoothing unnecessary.
Actually on my 5k mac it is worse...I guess it is in the eyes of the beholder as to what we all prefer.
You have to log out and back in to have the setting take effect.
My take on this is the other way around - I think it's fine on the retina display and really needs to be turned off for the MBA TN displays. YMMV!
The best place to see the difference instantly is the system preferences - General panel and the time. They both change as I toggle that setting.
It's possible that there isn't any difference, or that the difference depends on settings, with the retina displays. I did see some difference on an MBA TN display, though it wasn't dramatic.
I don't see any difference either way. Of course, my old eyes don't see any difference between retina and non-retina, either.
With font smoothing:
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I agree...mostly so on the menu bar the font smoothing is much better with my iMac retina...no question...maybe it is better on a laptop. I have no way to know seeing as I have no MacBook retina to gauge it against. The beauty here is the font smoothing selection is optional as per the user. Win win!
I turned it off as it gives more space between the letters. Especially on scaled resolutions it looks a lot better with smoothing turned off.