Before I saw this gist I had been completely unaware of the fact that Snow Leopard disables subpixel font rendering on non-Apple displays. Font rendering is something that drives me crazy if it's not done right. It's one of my main gripes with Windows (YMMV).
Thanks to the respective hack my Samsung 24" has suddenly become acceptable to work on again. Awesome.
Don't you hate being a font-rendering snob and then realizing you've been staring at something ugly for months without realizing it?
I'm not being snide; it's happened to me. I used to be a typesetter, and yet when I had trouble using Inconsolata in Sublime Text, I reverted back to Menlo, which I hated - and spent the next few months preaching about how hard I'd worked to find the Perfect Programmer Font For Me, not realizing I wasn't actually looking it in the editor. Worse, I was seeing it in Terminal; I had no excuse.
It's the visual equivalent of the classic audio production goof: You spend hours tweaking a particular equalizer setting, everybody agrees that it sounds perfect now, and then realize the EQ hasn't been patched in at all and you've been changing nothing.
I just stopped using the monitor after half an hour of using OS X on it and gave it to my roommate, since I'm hardly ever home anyway. Now it's back on my desk again.
It bugs me that I thought I needed a better screen instead of instantly seeing what's the issue. Especially since I used to play around a lot with the Freetype settings in Ubuntu and should have known what makes the fonts look the way they do.
But then again I trusted Apple to not let this kind of stuff happen.
Comments
Before I saw this gist I had been completely unaware of the fact that Snow Leopard disables subpixel font rendering on non-Apple displays. Font rendering is something that drives me crazy if it's not done right. It's one of my main gripes with Windows (YMMV).
Thanks to the respective hack my Samsung 24" has suddenly become acceptable to work on again. Awesome.
Don't you hate being a font-rendering snob and then realizing you've been staring at something ugly for months without realizing it?
I'm not being snide; it's happened to me. I used to be a typesetter, and yet when I had trouble using Inconsolata in Sublime Text, I reverted back to Menlo, which I hated - and spent the next few months preaching about how hard I'd worked to find the Perfect Programmer Font For Me, not realizing I wasn't actually looking it in the editor. Worse, I was seeing it in Terminal; I had no excuse.
It's the visual equivalent of the classic audio production goof: You spend hours tweaking a particular equalizer setting, everybody agrees that it sounds perfect now, and then realize the EQ hasn't been patched in at all and you've been changing nothing.
I just stopped using the monitor after half an hour of using OS X on it and gave it to my roommate, since I'm hardly ever home anyway. Now it's back on my desk again.
It bugs me that I thought I needed a better screen instead of instantly seeing what's the issue. Especially since I used to play around a lot with the Freetype settings in Ubuntu and should have known what makes the fonts look the way they do.
But then again I trusted Apple to not let this kind of stuff happen.
Font rendering must really drive you crazy if you had not noticed yet that it was off...
See my answer to jaylevitt's posting.