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Remove color fringing on LCD antialiased text System
If, like me, you've been bothered by Jaguar introducing colors into the anti-aliased text on your flat panel display, then there IS a solution... it's just hard to stumble across. In the General preference pane, change the setting from "Medium - best for Flat Panel" (or whatever else you use) and try "Standard - best for CRT" instead. Don't ask me why the two options are named as they are.

The reason this is tricky to notice is that the effects don't take until you've done something to trigger them. Quitting System Preferences was sufficient for the Finder, but OmniWeb needed to be quit and reloaded.

If, on the other hand, you prefer the sparkle-tastic color mode, by all means, enjoy it. Credit to Claylikethemud for the tip.

[Editor's note: I haven't noticed any color bleeding on our iBook, but I don't have a large desktop LCD display to make any artifacts truly visible. Anyone else notice color fringes on their LCD displays?]
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Remove color fringing on LCD antialiased text | 5 comments | Create New Account
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Why color fringing?
Authored by: network23 on Sep 12, '02 11:01:31AM

The \"color fringing\" on LCD monitors all has to do with how the RGB pixels are laid arranged on an LCD versus CRT. The sub-pixel antialiasing uses color pixels on LCD\'s to increase the \"apparent resolution\" of the text. Personally, I don\'t notice it. If you really want to see what it looks like, switch to the \"best for LCD\" mode and then turn on the Universal Access zoom mode and zoom in on some text.



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sub-pixel anti-aliasing
Authored by: sjonke on Sep 12, '02 11:58:37AM

As noted, the stray colors are due to this "great" feature called sub-pixel anti-aliasing which people have been clamoring for because "Windows already had it" (I guess).

You may have seen this long ago - Apple used something similar, but on a much larger pixel scale, on the Apple II which is why graphics always looked multicolor on that machine unless you carefully positioned pixels on the screen. Admittedly it's not nearly *that* bad in Jaguar (and Windows), but I still don't get it - it looks horrible and I don't notice any apparent improvement in resolution either.



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Color Fringing
Authored by: landtuna on Sep 12, '02 03:04:12PM

I noticed the color fringing, too, on my iMac flat panel.

Curious, I took screen shots of my folder names in Mail.app in every anti-aliasing mode. (I found that the only way to reliably change all fonts to the new anti-aliasing mode was to log out and back in.)

I then used the zoom feature to look at them closely (and I could definitely tell a difference there). When compared at normal zoom, though, they were tough to tell apart. I could see that the non-CRT modes had color fringing, and that the fringing got stronger at higher anti-aliasing.

Eventually, I ended up agreeing that the Medium setting was the best tradeoff between smooth fonts and color fringing. (The CRT mode seemed to fuzz horizontal lines in small monospace fonts more.)



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Doesn't seem as good as it shoud be...
Authored by: biscuit on Sep 13, '02 04:24:36AM

I was looking forward to sub-pixel rendering in Jag, but I've been a bit disappointed so far. I can see the coloured fringes and anything that isn't black on white looks awful. This is however a known limitation of sub-pixel rendering. Check out this link for lots of good info:

http://grc.com/cleartype.htm

I think Light is just about OK, I've not really played with it much. All I can think is that Apple's implementation isn't great. The promise seems to be there but is isn't living up to the hype...

biscuit



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So...
Authored by: buttersideup on Sep 13, '02 01:28:31PM

...does this mean we get a small boost in rendering speed and a reduction in memory use if the sub-pixel shading is off? Seems like it would work that way...



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