Quartz Text Display Fuzzy in OS X?

If you're among those whose eyes rebel at the new OS X text display, here are some tips for improving it

Although "fuzziness" is largely in the eye of the beholder, the way Mac OS X displays text is definitely problematic for some users.

The type of screen you're using is a factor in display quality, of course, but short of going to the expense of replacing your monitor, there are some tricks you can employ:

System Preference Settings

1. Open the Apple menu and go to the "System Preferences Folder."
2. Go to "Appearance." Go to "Font smoothing style" and make the selection most appropriate for your monitor.
3. Try resetting the "turn off text smoothing" feature to different font sizes.

TinkerTool

If modifying System Preferences doesn't work for you, you can disable smoothing completely with Tinker Tool, available free from http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

Reset the Anti-alias Threshold

This hint originates from http://www.macosxhints.com/ :

To set the anti-alias threshold to 128 points or higher, type this at the command prompt:

defaults write g Apple AntiAliasing Threshold 128

(A few users have reported problems with Photoshop crashing if the value is set so high. You can reset the feature by using the value 12 in place of 128 in the line above.)