Why do fonts sometimes look "fat" on Mac OS X?

Posted by jtimberman on Super User See other posts from Super User or by jtimberman
Published on 2010-01-25T01:11:44Z Indexed on 2010/03/17 21:21 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 331

Filed under:

fonts

|

osx

|

display

|

visual

Sometimes when resuming from suspend, the fonts in Mac OS X look "fatter" than normal. Unfortunately right now I can't get my Macbook Pro to exhibit the "normal" behavior for comparison, it has been abnormal yesterday and today. If I can get screenshots of what I think is 'normal', I'll add them.

"Fixing" this has been random. I use an external monitor, and sometimes unplugging it and plugging back in, or even turning it off and back on has worked. Sometimes with the display attached (or not) detecting displays works. Sometimes logging out or rebooting entirely is what it takes.

Displays used:

Macbook Pro 15" built-in display
Dell 27" LCD (2009 model)

Software where I see this happen, at least most noticably:

Firefox (screenshots below)
iTerm
Things
MacIrssi (screenshots below)

I am using Mac OS X 10.5.8.

"Abnormal" view from MacIrssi with Inconsolata 16 pt.

abnormal (Macirssi) image full size

"Abnormal" view from Firefox.

abnormal (Firefox)

Finally got it to switch back, though after resuming from suspend its back to "fat" :-(.

normal (Macirssi) image full size

And 'normal' in Firefox:

normal (Firefox)

© Super User or respective owner

Related posts about fonts

Netbeans and LibreOffice do not recognize the new fonts in /usr/share/fonts

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
I installed some new fonts following this guide https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Fonts. Netbeans and LibreOffice do not recognize the new fonts in /usr/share/fonts and Mousepad recognizes them. Netbeans7.4(from Netbeans.com) recognizes the fonts if they are located in .fonts/ in my home folder. How can I… >>> More
Upgrading from 13.04 to 13.10 stops

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
The upgrade to 13.10 stops after a lot of error messages about texlive packages, that I could close. The upgrade goes then further, but now it is stopped. What can I do to initiate the process again? The following are the last messages from the command window.: g multiple <family> in <alias>… >>> More
How to know which fonts are used in selected part of a PDF document

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I'm using Foxit Reader as default PDF viewer. How can I see what type of font is used for a selected part of a PDF document? >>> More
Size Mismatch Between Swing Fonts and Printable Fonts in Java

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi All, I've got a panel displaying a JTextPane backed by a StyledDocument. When I print a string of text in, say Arial 16, the text it prints is of a different size than the Arial 16 Word prints. Is there some sort of flaw in the translation of Swing fonts to Windows system fonts or something… >>> More
problem in fonts type and fonts size on printing

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
hello i have a application on php that i show a report in the table , i want to print this page i can see my page fine in print preview , but when i send thuis page to printer ,the fonts are small and diffrent fonts that i set in css file this is my css file @page { size: A4 landscape; margin-top:2cm; … >>> More

Related posts about osx

OSX/Wine - Associating file extension (.php) with a Windows program on OSX

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Greetings, I am running PSPad (a Windows programming editor) on OSX/Snow Leopard using Wine 1.1.35 I want to associate various file extensions (.php, .js, .html) with PSPad.exe OSX Finder does not allow this association -- I can only associate file types with $.app items in Applications. How do… >>> More
osx web service spawns icon in taskbar - osx - while drawing image

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have a web endpoint that displays an image of a string... When the following code is run (in tomcat) it spawns a java icon in the taskbar on OSX. Not sure if it is a problem, or whats going on. Looking for some sort of explination @RequestMapping("/text/{text}") public void textImage(HttpServletResponse… >>> More
Cannot disable spotlight indexing on volume

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I have a FAT32 partition on my HDD. When using OSX, it is mounted to /Volumes/MEDIA. After a recent upgrade to Mavericks, spotlight is having trouble indexing it, eating up almost all of my system resources, and I cannot get the indexing to stop: [jay-mba-osx ~]% sudo mdutil -v -a -i off /: Indexing… >>> More
OSX - User home directories shared via NFS

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
Hi, I've run into some problems with how I've got user home directories set up on our system here. Our server is an XServe, using Open Directory to manage the user accounts. The majority of our workstations are OSX, but there are a few running Linux (Centos 5.3), and, as time goes on, we expect… >>> More
Can't connect to local IP address on OSX

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I'm trying to connect to a webserver that's running on my mac OSX 1.6. I'm able to connect to it locally using http://127.0.0.1:8888/myapp but when I attempt to connect to it using my machine's local IP address (http://192.168.1.15:8888/myapp IP shown below) from the same machine (or another on the… >>> More