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A simple trick to conserve laptop battery power
Authored by: bigbold on Dec 08, '05 08:09:56AM

White on black often is easier to read, but (or is this just me?) the anti-aliasing/smoothing is awful compared to 'real' white on black without using the inverted color mode.. making it all hard to read.



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Slightly degrades anti-aliased type
Authored by: MJCube on Dec 08, '05 09:05:16AM

Yes, that's right, because sub-pixel anti-aliasing for TFT displays requires R-G-B oriented left to right, so reversing the colors is no good. I find that type in inverted color looks better if you (1) switch also to greyscale (in System Prefs > Universal Access), and/or (2) change the font smoothing style (in System Prefs > Appearance) to Standard, which turns off sub-pixel anti-aliasing.

Method 2 does not take effect immediately; you have to quit & relaunch apps. This makes it easy to compare the results, actually. Type some text in one app, change the setting, launch another app, paste, and compare them side by side. I find that Standard smoothing makes a slightly softer look, which I prefer for white-on-black. Just switching to greyscale (method 1) looks a bit sharper.

Both of these require a visit to System Prefs, since there are no keyboard shortcuts for them. Unless somebody can chime in with another method …



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