Antialiasing in Panther

voltagovoltago
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
I?ve tested Mac OS X 10.3 Build 7B85 thoroughly and found an annoying ?feature? (at least for me!). It seems that Apple has ?tinkered? with the way Panther is displaying fonts. The ?infamous? Font Antialiasing feature has become worse!



I?m working on a PowerBook 63 (Pismo) 500Mhz and text is definitely more difficult to read especially in Safari. It seems also that Safari is either partly using bigger sizes of fonts compared to Safari 1.0 in Jaguar or that these fonts are displayed in a subtle different way?! I don?t know if this behavior is because of the new Safari version 1.1. But what I?ve found is that Panther has undergone changes when it comes to displaying fonts on a LCD-Display as you can see under www.apple.com/macosx/features/aqua/. On the right side under ?Features in Panther? you can read the following:



Finer LCD Font Antialiasing With ?Micro-pixel Positioning?: Read text more easily on flat panel displays.



For me the opposite is true! I know that these things are subjective but I would like to know if there are other people experiencing the same?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    alexandrealexandre Posts: 14member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Voltago

    Finer LCD Font Antialiasing With ?Micro-pixel Positioning?: Read text more easily on flat panel displays.



    For me the opposite is true! I know that these things are subjective but I would like to know if there are other people experiencing the same? [/B]



    For me, text/antialiasing is way better in 10.3. That's one of the reasons I stuck with some of the earlier 10.3 betas, I just couldn't go back to 10.2's text rendering/antialiasing.



    I believe people in general will find much to like in 10.3's improved text antialiasing.
  • Reply 2 of 4
    voltagovoltago Posts: 2member
    Could it be that there is any connection to the graphic card and its abilities in my Pismo concerning the new antialiasing with "Micro-pixel Positioning? in Panther?
  • Reply 3 of 4
    scottscott Posts: 7,431member
    I guess that's what Apple calls sub pixel rendering. Something they should have considering they don't sell CRTs anymore.
  • Reply 4 of 4
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Voltago

    Could it be that there is any connection to the graphic card and its abilities in my Pismo concerning the new antialiasing with "Micro-pixel Positioning? in Panther?



    It has nothing to do with the graphics card.



    It just takes advantage of the position of the red, green, and blue parts in each actual pixel and uses them to further aid in antialiasing text. The drawback is that you can get a minor "rainbow" effect along the vertical edges of some characters because the AA adjusts the red, green, and blue values individually instead of all of them together (which instead would make grey).



    This feature has been around since 10.2, but it would seem that Apple has made some improvements to it with Panther.



    If you don't like it, simply switch to "Standard - best for CRT" and it will use standard grayscale AA.
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