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Hack Enables Quartz Anti-Aliasing In All Carbon Apps
Xenex writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.1.5 a few days ago, Carbon applications now have access to Quartz anti-aliasing. However, we have to wait for developers to release updated versions of their applications to take advantage it. The people at Unsanity have decided that they didn't want to wait, and have released a 'haxie' called Silk. It forces Carbon applications to use the new Quartz anti-aliasing, and my experiences with it have all been perfect. So, now you can have a beautiful Snak, Mozilla, IE ... if it's Carbon, it's made pretty."
I've found some fonts that don't work at all well with anti-aliasing. I ended up having to turn it off in PowerPoint, as they end up being the fonts that I like to use in presentations... :(
i don't see all-encompassing quartz anti-aliasing support as some sort of OSX holy grail. some applications look nice with antialiasing, others look downright ugly. it's nice that this hack lets you specify which programs you don't want it to apply antialiasing to, but i'd much rather it worked in reverse. allowing me to try out the look of an app with antialiasing would be useful in determining if it's feasible to keep it activated.
as it stands, there are a plethora of available apps built with ATSUI text rendering (understand that they take a significant speed hit in doing so), and more productivity apps are being updated daily. i LOVE chimera's option to disable "text smoothing" as it really does give credence to their claims that Apple needs to get on the ball with speeding up quartz antialiasing. and 10.1.5 DOES help this problem somewhat - i had downloaded an early (also hackish) version of Mozilla linked with ATSUI text rendering and it seemed much slower than my vanilla Mozilla install performed under this hack.
this is a very cool thing indeed, but antialiasing isn't the be-all end-all of the OS X user experience.
This is new ground....the recommendation is to experiment w/various screen resolutions and monitor (OSD) settings to find the most 'pleasing' configuration for you.
Things like ambient light, text vs. graphics and eye posture (do you wear glasses....are they specifically designed for working w/computer monitors. etc.) are all factors that can affect viewing, and with new technologies like Quartz, we'll need time to learn how to optimize the otherwise disparate components.
Pixeless screen resolution and the phrase'paper like' are items and terms we now need to learn and use.
I have also found that anti-aliased fonts are difficult to read. I think the reason is partly the "fuzziness" that you talk about. But the letters also look dimmer. Since the color is spread out over more pixels, there are fewer pixels that are actually solid black. Most pixels become some shade of grey and are harder for the eye to pick up. I am leaving it turned on for a while to see if I get used to it. But it's not a clear advantage.
Devon
Ironically, I've been going through a lot of trouble to turn off as much anti-aliasing as possible on my TiBook. It may look nice on a big screen, but I keep having to lean in and read twice on quite a few of the fonts, due to the red-and-blue that anti-aliasing seems to create.
I don't know if this is a problem with me, the screen, or the rendering. The only drawback seems to be that Quartz apps that expect anti-aliasing don't always know when it's turned off and the spacing on proportional fonts sometimes ends up quite strange.
Still, it's nice to see that the tradition of Small, Useful Mac Plugins continues. It's the enthusiasm of programmers that have kept me far from disappointed in the Macintosh.
This now concludes our broadcast day.
I think you may have it exactly right. I only have problems with antialiased text when the font size is small. If the strokes of the aliased text are solid black and one pixel wide, they usually become two pixels wide and middle-gray when they are antialiased, which makes them much harder to read. Also, once the "natural" stroke width drops below a pixel (i.e., very small text), antialiasing seems to help again -- I can recognize the patterns of tiny fuzzy text more easily than tiny distorted text.
I think this problem may be more pronounced on digital flat panels (e.g., my iBook). CRTs are much fuzzier than LCDs at the individual pixel level to begin with, so anti-aliasing may help (or at least not hurt) them, while it makes text less sharp on an LCD.
There's an interesting article on the topic here.
Altogether, font anti-aliasing is really a niche feature that's best left off by default. Only a few applications really benefit from it--mostly graphic design and photo editing applications dealing with large fonts.
Personally, I prefer that it be on by default. Far more things than design and photo editing benefit from it--IE, namely. The text rendering in IE on OS X is just downright horrid compared to some of the other browsers available (Chimera, OmniWeb)--so much so that I had started to use IE less and less as Chimera matured, solely because Chimera looks so much better. After installing Silk, IE looks essentially just as good as Chimera. Now, until Chimera really advances in features and stability, I've got no reason to use it because the text in IE finally looks as good as the rest of OS X.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Are you by chance using a CRT instead of an LCD? I'm wondering how much difference that makes.
I appreciate the "use whatever you like" notion, but as OS X comes into its own, I'm getting a distinct impression that everyone's going to end up with anti-aliased text, like it or not, without any real discussion of its merits and demerits. That's why I brought it up here.
As I noted before, I think anti-aliased text is the best choice in many cases: very small text, large text, or screen versions of print-oriented documents (e.g., PDFs, where the alternative is weirdly spaced aliased text).
But I still think the best thing for doing lots of on-screen reading may be well-hinted, aliased fonts, spaced and pixel-aligned with on-screen reading in mind. That's a pretty tall order, and somewhat kludgy, since it harkens back to the old screen-font/printer-font days -- it isn't "true" typography and doesn't fit that well with WYSIWYG workflow across different devices. So maybe I'll just have to get used to anti-aliasing. I do like the look of it, at least.