Adjusting Font Smoothing
If the fonts on your screen look fuzzy, blurry, or jagged, you may want to adjust the
font smoothing style or change the text size at which Mac OS X starts to smooth
fonts. Fonts may also be distorted when exporting to a PDF file. You can adjust font
smoothing settings to smooth the fonts exported to PDF files.
To smooth the fonts on your screen:
1
Open System Preferences and click Appearance.
2
To turn on font smoothing in Mac OS X v10.6 (Snow Leopard) or later, select “Use LCD
font smoothing when available.”
To specify a font smoothing style in Mac OS X v10.5.7 (Leopard) or earlier, choose a
font smoothing style from the “Font smoothing style” pop-up menu.
Depending on the type of display you have, you may notice only small or no
differences between smoothing styles.
3
If you plan to use small font sizes in your document, choose a point size from the “Turn
off text smoothing for font sizes” pop-up menu.
When text smoothing (“antialiasing”) is on, smaller fonts can be harder to read so you
may want to turn it off for smaller font sizes.
To learn more about font smoothing in Mac OS X, click the Help button in the lower-
right corner of the Appearance preferences window.