Mac OS X font problems

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anton@solovyev.com - 26 Apr 2006 17:57 GMT

Hi,

I am a new Mac OS X user. I have recently gotten an Intel based Mac
book laptop. Unfortunately, I am not able to even start using it
seriosly because I am having serious problems with fonts in web
browsers and e-mail readers. Specifically, I m looking to use Firefox
and Thunderbird. And if Firefox is somewhat discussable, Thunderbird
would be a deal breaker.

The problem I am having is large and ugly anti-aliased fonts in Mac OS
X. I want crisp and small non-AA fonts, the ones I can get in Linux or
Windows (I have exclusively used Linux/FreeBSD/SCO since 1994).
Specifically, I am looking for the type of fonts contained in adobe-*,
misc-* and b&h-* families in X11. Typical Windows fonts in Windows
Classic theme (is it Tahoma?) used in menus, Internet Explorer and
Outlook would probably work too.

The default Max OS X fonts, besides being large, too wide-spaced and
fuzzy, have serious problems with Cyrillic letters which I must have. I
have tried multiple combinations of "normal" and fonts having "CE" in
their names, but they all have different sizes of Cyrillic and latin
letters and other problems (too wide, too narrow, unreadable,
overlapping letters, etc).

I have tried multiple things, including adding Windows ttf collection,
turning off AA in system preferences, but none worked. Without AA
tdefault Mac OS X fonts become *really* bad. When I add Windows ttf
collection, I am not able to see Cyrillics in them.

Just to re-iterate: in order to avoid needless discussion about what
fonts look nice, I would like to at least get the type of fonts you get
when you turn on classic theme on a Windows XP box. No AA, small,
crisp.

Please do not laugh. This actually does make it impossible to even do
simpliest things with my Mac. It is a nice hardware, but the software
seems to suck real bad. It's been sitting under my cofee table for
almost a month, I try to make myself use the thing almost every night,
but so far I have not been able to even get comfortable Web browsing.

Thanks in advance!

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Alice Faber - 26 Apr 2006 18:24 GMT

> Hi,
>
[quoted text clipped - 37 lines]
>
> Thanks in advance!

You're talking esthetics, and that *is* individual. When I use Windows
on my iMac, I have to *increase* font size!

One thing, if you want Cyrillic, you should be using the Cyrillic fonts
(CY), not the Central European (CE) fonts.

Also, are you sure you're using the optimum display configuration for
your MBP? Some of what you're describing sounds like what would happen
if you have a non-optimal display resolution.

Could you give us the URL for a web page that you think looks
particularly awful? There are, alas, some pages that hard-code font
sizes in such a way that they look fine in Windows but not on a Mac.

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Anton Solovyev - 27 Apr 2006 04:47 GMT

> You're talking esthetics, and that *is* individual. When I use Windows
> on my iMac, I have to *increase* font size!

The thing though on Linux or Windows I have a choice...

> One thing, if you want Cyrillic, you should be using the Cyrillic fonts
> (CY), not the Central European (CE) fonts.

Yes, sorry, I did not have the Mac in front of me, I actually meant "CY"
fonts.

> Also, are you sure you're using the optimum display configuration for
> your MBP? Some of what you're describing sounds like what would happen
> if you have a non-optimal display resolution.

Yes, I use maximum resolution ("optimal for built in panel" or some such).

> Could you give us the URL for a web page that you think looks
> particularly awful? There are, alas, some pages that hard-code font
> sizes in such a way that they look fine in Windows but not on a Mac.

http://www.solovyev.com/mac.jpg

http://www.solovyev.com/linux.jpg

The second picture would be ideal, but let's not get hang up on that.
Default Windows Classic style would be fine as well.

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Anton Solovyev

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Alice Faber - 27 Apr 2006 05:00 GMT

> > You're talking esthetics, and that *is* individual. When I use Windows
> > on my iMac, I have to *increase* font size!
[quoted text clipped - 23 lines]
> The second picture would be ideal, but let's not get hang up on that.
> Default Windows Classic style would be fine as well.

Well, those are your screen dumps, and totally dependent on your choice
of fonts. Given that I'm now reading news on an old 15" CRT iMac, both
look crappy. And you're comparing a Netscape display with a Mail.app
display. I don't use Mail.app, so I don't know what you can customize in
terms of display. I use Thunderbird, which is in the Netscape/Mozilla
tradition. In Thunderbird, there's a fair amount of choice of fonts for
each possible character encoding.

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AF
"Non Sequitur U has a really, really lousy debate team."
--artyw raises the bar on rec.sport.baseball

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J.J. O'Shea - 27 Apr 2006 11:16 GMT

> > You're talking esthetics, and that *is* individual. When I use Windows
> > on my iMac, I have to *increase* font size!
>
> The thing though on Linux or Windows I have a choice...

You do on Macs, too.

> > One thing, if you want Cyrillic, you should be using the Cyrillic fonts
> > (CY), not the Central European (CE) fonts.
[quoted text clipped - 18 lines]
> The second picture would be ideal, but let's not get hang up on that.
> Default Windows Classic style would be fine as well.

You're using Thunderbird. Go to the Preferences. Select the 'Display' pane.
There are two pop-up menus, one for incoming and one for outgoing mail. In
those pop-us are several Cyrillic choices, including Cyrillic (Windows-1251).
Pick the one you like.

In addition, there is a 'Fonts' button on that pane. Click on it. You may
select which fonts you want to use. You may select the size of the font. You
may select the minimum allowable font size. You may select the effective
screen resolution. Right now my copy of Thunderbird is set to the default:

Proportional: serif, size 16 points
Serif: Times
Sans-serif: Helvetica
Monospace: Courier, size 13 points.
Display: 96 dpi
Minimum font size: none.

Set the prefs in Thunderbird to what you want. Go to System Preferences.
Select the 'Appearance' pane. Set 'Font Smoothing' to 'Light'. Set the 'Turn
of Text Smoothing' pull-down to whatever size you set as your default size
font in Thunderbird.

You have now set the fonts the way you want. You have now turned off
anti-aliasing.

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email to oshea dot j dot j at gmail dot com.

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matt neuburg - 26 Apr 2006 18:50 GMT

> The problem I am having is large and ugly anti-aliased fonts in Mac OS
> X. I want crisp and small non-AA fonts

You might not be able to get that. You may be interested in my eBook,
Take Control of Customizing Tiger; I have some suggestions for improving
your text-reading experience. But some of those suggestions include
changing your mind-set. Large anti-aliased fonts are very easy to read,
provided you stop straining to bring them into focus. I am sympathetic,
since Mac OS 9 had tiny, non-anti-aliased fonts, and I liked that. But
I've gotten used to the way it is now.

> The default Max OS X fonts, besides being large, too wide-spaced and
> fuzzy, have serious problems with Cyrillic letters which I must have. I
> have tried multiple combinations of "normal" and fonts having "CE"

Okay, you're not understanding how fonts work on the Mac. Fonts and
character sets have nothing to do with each other. Mac OS X is Unicode.
No matter what font you "use", if you have any font at all that has a
needed character, you will see that character. And believe me, you've
got Cyrillic characters. So if you are not seeing characters correctly
in your browser, that is a flaw in your browser, or in your encoding
settings, or possibly in the web site. Again, I've discussed this matter
at length elsewhere. As Alice said, an example of a problem page would
be helpful. m.

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Tiger - http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/tiger-customizing.html
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Anton Solovyev - 27 Apr 2006 04:56 GMT

> You might not be able to get that. You may be interested in my eBook,
> Take Control of Customizing Tiger; I have some suggestions for improving
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> since Mac OS 9 had tiny, non-anti-aliased fonts, and I liked that. But
> I've gotten used to the way it is now.

Thank you, I'll check it out.

>>The default Max OS X fonts, besides being large, too wide-spaced and
>>fuzzy, have serious problems with Cyrillic letters which I must have. I
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
> at length elsewhere. As Alice said, an example of a problem page would
> be helpful. m.

I have not played with Windows TTF's much, so I am really not sure what
was the deal. They were anti-aliased too, so I did not dig any deeper.

Here is a screenshot from Mac:

http://www.solovyev.com/mac.jpg

and here is what I am using normally:

http://www.solovyev.com/linux.jpg

One more thing: I can stand AA fonts in menus and every place, but not
in text-oriented apps like news reader or Web browser...

Apparently, people at Apple realaize this too, since Terminal has pretty
decent raster font of an ok size (Monaco). Not as good as misc-fixed-
(xterm/xfree) or b&h-lucida-typewriter- (dtterm/solaris), but ok.

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Anton Solovyev

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matt neuburg - 27 Apr 2006 05:55 GMT

> > You might not be able to get that. You may be interested in my eBook,
> > Take Control of Customizing Tiger; I have some suggestions for improving
[quoted text clipped - 37 lines]
> decent raster font of an ok size (Monaco). Not as good as misc-fixed-
> (xterm/xfree) or b&h-lucida-typewriter- (dtterm/solaris), but ok.

I see the difference, but I don't see why the anti-aliased one is worse.
On my machine, Monaco 9 and 10 are not anti-aliased. It must be up to
the individual font. You can turn off anti-aliasing generally below a
certain size in the Appearance system prefs, and you can get finer
control if you use TinkerTool. That's all I can think of to help. m.

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chainsman@netscape.net - 31 May 2006 16:05 GMT

>One more thing: I can stand AA fonts in menus and every place, but not
>in text-oriented apps like news reader or Web browser...
>
>Apparently, people at Apple realaize this too, since Terminal has pretty
>decent raster font of an ok size (Monaco). Not as good as misc-fixed-
>(xterm/xfree) or b&h-lucida-typewriter- (dtterm/solaris), but ok.

Anton, I know it's been a while since you asked this question, but you can
almost completely turn off the blurry fonts in MacOS X by typing these commands
and logging out and back in:

defaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleSmoothFixedFontsSizeThreshold 999
defaults write CoreGraphics CGFontDisableAntiAliasing YES
defaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 999
defaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleSmoothFontsSizeThreshold 999

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Mac Forum / General / General / May 2006

Mac OS X font problems