[Macworld.com]

A soft crashes forces Rob Griffiths to explore an area of OS X he hasn’t looked at in years—his system’s font smoothing settings. [more]

[jonesbot]

Perhaps it's different on laptops with a larger dot size, but I cannot stand sub-pixel anti-aliasing. My eyes hone in on the shimmering colors and it makes me think my monitor is broken. I'm on a Apple Cinema Display, too, so it's not like this is a quirk of my display, it's just how sub-pixel anti-aliasing works, and I think it's crap.
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, open DigitalColor Meter (in your Utilities folder) and look at the text up close; it works on the png comparison image in this article, so you can see all of them in action.
I'm a video professional and former graphic designer, and sub-pixel anti-aliasing gives me headaches. Some letters don't even look like they're the same color! (look at the "i" in "Magazine" without even zooming in.)
The part that ticks me off is that even though I tell the OS to use Standard font smoothing, system dialogs will always, always use Automatic. Which means my force quit window comes up, and it looks like every thing's been bolded. But not with regular bold. With ugly, multi-color, shimmering vomitous bold.
For some answers, though, on the change, John Gruber did a write-up on the topic explaining Tiger's switch of the use of "Automatic" font smoothing July of 2005.

[donkey]

In reply to:

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Perhaps it's different on laptops with a larger dot size, but I cannot stand sub-pixel anti-aliasing. My eyes hone in on the shimmering colors and it makes me think my monitor is broken. I'm on a Apple Cinema Display, too, so it's not like this is a quirk of my display, it's just how sub-pixel anti-aliasing works, and I think it's crap.
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, open DigitalColor Meter (in your Utilities folder) and look at the text up close; it works on the png comparison image in this article, so you can see all of them in action.

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Use the Light... "Best for CRT"... font smoothing. It looks like it does the anti-aliasing in grayscale, while all the others use the sub-pixel, multi colored anti-aliasing.
I also have an older 23" apple LCD display, and I think the light anti-aliasing looks the best on it anyways. Smaller and bolded fonts are much more crisp and readable, and fonts don't seem to change weights in like the Edit and File menus when you move your mouse over them.

[uchuugaka]

geez.
Computers have always had this issue with anti-aliasing.
If it bugs you that much, get a CRT, you'll get better color gamut anyway.
eventually, computer monitors will reach something like 150ppi or better, but you'll need a graphics card that could cook your lunch.

[jhmaughan]

Does the font smoothing only apply to the finder, or does it apply to other applications as well?
I am entitled to one dumb question a month right?

[jonesbot]

"Light" uses sub-pixel antialiasing. If you can't tell from it's broken appearance in the PNG comparison, use digital color meter. Only "Standard" uses regular greyscale antialiasing.
And a CRT? Um...no. Happy to have left the world of the red-eyes years ago. And there's nothing wrong with the antialiasing on an LCD with the "Standard" setting. It's just either algorithm (or the whole idea) of antialiasing on a sub-pixel level that looks like garbage to me.

[ANDunning]

In reply to:

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holding Option and then clicking and holding on the Finders Dock icon

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Should be "holding Control".

[Luke_Macwalker]

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In reply to:

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holding Option and then clicking and holding on the Finders Dock icon

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Should be "holding Control".

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No, option is the right option here... /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif

[Luke_Macwalker]

In reply to:

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Does the font smoothing only apply to the finder, or does it apply to other applications as well?

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The font smoothing applies to all Mac OS X applications.
You can check it with TextEdit for example, which I find more convenient to quit and relaunch than the Finder by the way.
To do comparisons, copy and paste a few paragraphs of text in a new TextEdit document, take a snapshot of the window, quit TextEdit, change the font smoothing setting, relaunch TextEdit, paste the same text and open the screenshot beside the TextEdit window: you can see the difference very clearly.

[griffman]

Yes, it works in all apps as noted. I used the Finder because it let me show not only black-on-white, but white-on-blue, as that's where the problem was (for me) most notable.
Thanks for the link to the Gruber piece; I hadn't read that before.
-rob.

[Zoopster]

What about if you have 2 monitors -- 1 an external LCD, the other an internal eMac CRT?