LCD Font Smoothing in Snow Leopard: how to force activate it

thorazine74 · #1 10-12-2009, 09:06 PM

You may have noticed that Apple changed LCD Font Smoothing settings in System Preferences:

Now it looks like you can only turn it on or off. However even when that toggle turned on SL wont activate LCD Font Smoothing when it believes your monitor is not an LCD, and it seems to be the case that most non-Apple LCD monitors fail to be detected as such, so in most of our hackintoshes we would be running without LCD Font Smoothing even with that option toggled on.
Its been reported in many places already that typing this in Terminal will force activate LCD Font Smoothing:

Code:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

The number at the end specifies the degree of smoothing, being:
0 = LCD Smoothing Off
1 = Light
2 = Medium
3 = Strong

I post it here again with some sample screenshots so you can see for yourself the difference, and taken into account that most of us hackintosh users we would be running non-Apple-manufactured LCD monitors, we would be missing the LCD filtering maybe without even knowing it,
So in case you were wondering like me why the fonts look so ugly in Snow, here is how to fix it.

Note: you have to expand the pictures to see the differences clearly.

Code:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

[No LCD Smoothing - Default setting in Snow Leo, even when toggled on in SysPref, in most non-Apple monitors]

Code:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 1

[Light LCD Smoothing]

Code:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

[Medium LCD Smoothing - Equivalent to Leopard Default setting]

Code:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 3

[Strong LCD Smoothing]

slic · #2 10-12-2009, 10:48 PM

THX 4 this