On Aug 21, 2007, at 2:54 PM, Jay Soffian wrote:

On Aug 21, 2007, at 5:10 AM, James Hicks wrote:

...

I love how Monaco 11 looks like against my dark TM background when in the "light" smoothing style. However I can't stand the rest of the OS text and especially Helvetica in Safari and prefer those to be in "standard" style, they all just look too fat in "light" while Monaco looks anaemic in "standard".

You can try this. Quit TextMate:

% defaults write com.macromates.textmate AppleFontSmoothing -int 1

That should enable light smoothing for TextMate only.

I haven't tested this, but I did find that the AppleFontSmoothing preference changes in my Library/Preferences/ ByHost/.GlobalPreferences.<hex>.plist file when I adjust the preference in the the Appearance system preference panel (it changes in com.apple.systempreferences.plist as well, but I doubt that affects anything but the preference pane).

(Aside, does anyone understand the difference between the preferences under Library/Preferences and those under Library/ Preferences/ByHost?)

There might be other knobs as well. I found this page, but it's over 5 years old:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100148/stories/2002/02/04/macOsX1012FontRendering....

Report back what you find!

Thanks, j.

WOW! That totally works! That looks a LOT better.

This also works: defaults write com.macromates.textmate AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

But it's MUCH lighter, maybe a bit too light, that one. Something in between would be best. Do you think you could do 0.5? What would be the syntax for that?

thomas Aylott — subtleGradient — CrazyEgg — bundleForge

On 21 Aug 2007, at 16:25, Thomas Aylott (subtleGradient) wrote:

Do you think you could do 0.5? What would be the syntax for that?

Most likely

defaults write com.macromates.textmate AppleFontSmoothing -float 0.5

But it looks like it’s treated the same as 0 to me

On Aug 21, 2007, at 8:54 PM, Jay Soffian wrote:

[...] (Aside, does anyone understand the difference between the preferences under Library/Preferences and those under Library/ Preferences/ByHost?)

Generally settings should be machine (host) independent, but e.g. the font smoothing preference may depend on your current hardware display (e.g. sub-pixel anti-alias is not available for CRT displays) and is therefor stored as “only for this host”.

This appears to be implemented by storing the host-specific preference as ByHost/«regular app identifier».«host id».plist.

This would be useful in an environment where different machines boot using a shared user folder.