Automatic Font Smoothing

Mac OS X uses PostScript, or Display PDF, to render what you see onscreen. Since Mac OS X understands PostScript, your fonts should all look correct onscreen regardless of which format they are. Mac OS X also automatically smooths the edges of fonts and curved objects using a technique called anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing blends the colors at the edges of objects, creating a kind of blurred effect that tricks your eyes into seeing a smooth edge.

If the text you see on your display looks blurry, Mac OS X may not be smoothing the text correctly for your type of display. An Apple Cinema Display, which is an LCD monitor, needs to have text smoothed differently than a ViewSonic 19-inch Graphics CRT monitor. You can manually set the degree of font smoothing in the Appearance pane of System Preferences (Figure 2.12).

Figure 2.12. Mac OS X smooths text onscreen based on the type of monitor you are using, but if you don't like how the text looks, you can set your own smoothing level in the Appearance preference pane.

1.	Launch System Preferences (choose Apple menu > System Preferences).
2.	Click the Appearance icon.
3.	Choose the level of smoothing you want from the "Font smoothing style" pop-up menu.

I find that Medium looks best on my Apple Cinema Display, and that Standard tends to look good on most CRT displays.

Tip

Photoshop 5.5 and later properly renders PostScript fonts in the Classic environment. If the only nonMac OS Xnative design-related application you use is Photoshop, you don't have to install ATM Lite.

If you use the Classic environment, however, your Mac OS 9compatible applications can't take advantage of automatic font smoothing for PostScript fonts. The Classic environment doesn't use Display PDF to render objects or fonts onscreen, so PostScript fonts end up looking jagged and blocky. Installing Adobe ATM Lite fixes the PostScript rendering problem for Classic applications. If you want to learn more about the Classic environment and ATM Lite, check out Chapter 7.