Please help me GLOBALLY DISABLE font smoothing (anti-aliasing) in Tiger

allterrainbrain — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:13:48 -0800

Please help me GLOBALLY DISABLE font smoothing (anti-aliasing) in Tiger. I did it almost-completely in Panther, but the Panther solution needs another step in Tiger. Yes, I'm positive I don't want font smoothing. :)

So here are the two commands I found to use in Panther. Both need to be done as root.
defaults write -g AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 128
defaults write CoreGraphics CGFontDisableAntialiasing YES

(I assume 128 could be any number and it's just "something bigger than the biggest font size you expect to ever use.")

In Tiger (on Intel), using these doesn't work to disable anti-aliasing in the menu text across the top of the screen.

My Panther machine (which I still have, if you want me to report anything about it) is definitely using non-anti-aliased Lucida Grande on all the top menus -- whether in Finder or in any app. HOWEVER, I never got the other kinds of system text (dialog boxes, Preference panels, etc.) to stop using anti-aliasing. So the font rendering in the menus is somehow different from the rendering in other kinds of "system" text.

Unfortunately I didn't keep a record of everything I did in Panther, and it's been a few years now -- I only remember it as a long, roundabout process of googling & trying different solutions. So it's likely that something else I did in addition to these two commands made the top menus stop using anti-aliasing. So what could that extra something have been??

(TinkerTool and its siblings aren't the answer, since their option for disabling font smoothing seems to be just a graphical frontend for the AppleAntialiasingThreshold command above. But of course I'd hugely appreciate any tip about a tweaking app I missed that goes further -- that got rid of anti-aliasing in your top menus, not just inside your apps, in Tiger.)

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Please help me GLOBALLY DISABLE font smoothing (anti-aliasing) in Tiger