Turning off Mac OSX text anti aliasing selectively

15 October, 2007 – 5:28 pm

I’ve been experimenting with a couple of different IDEs lately for Java development, and the two at the top of my list are NetBeans and Eclipse. A frustrating thing is that Mac OSX tends to ignore anti aliasing rules for text in these applications. I think it has something to do with the way the applications themselves are rendering the text (slightly higher scale).

You can obviously turn off text smoothing for font sizes in your global system preferences, but I like having anti aliased text for other applications like mail and internet.

Roger Braunstein identified a neat hack here which essentially rescaled a proportional bit map font (ProggySquare) by a factor of around 300%. Thus when you use the font in an application like NetBeans, you simply set the ProggySquareHuge font (size=4) and your standard font smoothing rules still apply, eg. smooth everything below size 10.

This is a great solution for NetBeans and works a treat, however I couldn’t get it to work properly for Eclipse. It looks like the bold font types really turn out to be 4pt in size, so basically unreadable.

Reading between the lines in some of the user comments, it is possible to set font smoothing rules on an application by application basis. Simply type the following from the terminal for eclipse
defaults write org.eclipse.eclipse AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 20

This means all fonts under the size of 20 will not be anti aliased for this particular application. You can do this for any application as listed in /Library/Preferences/*

This also works for the ActiveState Komodo IDE
defaults write com.activestate.Komodo AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 20