Improve the appearance of X11 fonts

Jun 02, '06 07:30:01AM

Contributed by: paperwings

As a former linux nut, I have a lot of X11 apps that I use on a regular basis. I was disappointed in Apple's X11 font rendering. After dealing with the jagged eyesores for a year, I happened across a bit of information (on the OpenOffice.org website) that radically improved the font appearance. It seems obvious, but it wasn't to me at first.

Launch X11 and open the Preferences section. On the Output tab, change the Colors pull-down to 'Millions' instead of 'From Display.' Restart X11.

That's it. It wasn't obvious to me, because I assumed that 'From Display' would set the color depth to something large.

[robg adds: I couldn't see any difference in the OpenOffice test document that I used (I run my OS X display in millions of colors). I then tried X11 with my display set to Thousands and the 'From Display' setting in X11. Yech! The fonts were pixelated, and the anti-aliasing was odd colors -- it was borderline unreadable. I can't contact the original hint author to confirm, but perhaps their display was similarly set. If you run in Millions mode on your normal display, this hint may not have any effect for you.]

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Mac OS X Hints
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