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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 wonder why in this whole discussion about anti-aliased fonts in carbon apps or other operating system nobody mentions that quartz text rendering is more than simple anti-aliasing of glyphs (i.e. characters).
if you render a single glyph not aliased, for readibility reasons you have to place it within the pixel matrix. The effect you get if you'd use some sort of "exact" glyph positioning was possible to see if you switched on the "fractional character width" in old classic applications (AppleWorks has this settings in the text preference); using this "exact" character width as opposed to "character width as necessary to the pixel matrix" gives you strange gaps between letters. the fractional character width gives you the same glyph placement at it would be printed on a high-resolution device like a printer.
quartz adopts PDF rendering for exactly this reason. it's not anti-aliased single letters but anti-aliased "whole pages".
i cannot understand the complaints about unreadable anti-aliased text in cocoa-applications. here it's possible to clearly read 6pt text -- as opposed to carbon apps where everything below 9pt is almost unreadable.
btw in omniweb (in 4.1 beta/sneaky peaks) you can immediatly switch off text smoothing in the fonts & colors preferences dialog. simply set the "Smooth text larger than..." to 255.
(this remarks should be rewritten by some native speakers)