Comments on: Aliased Text in Eclipse on OS X

By: Jannis Hermanns' place

Jannis Hermanns' place — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 10:47:05 +0000

OSX: Disable font anti-aliasing in Eclipse…

For those who use Eclipse in Leopard or Tiger, here’s a little tip on how to turn off font antialiasing. There is a system wide setting in the control panel, but it affects all applications. Usually I like smooth fonts - but not for programming. To se…

By: Netbeans Font Smoothing in OSX

Netbeans Font Smoothing in OSX — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:04:05 +0000

[...] tried setting the global font smoothing threshold in OSX preferences to no avail. People have had exactly the same issue in Eclipse but none of the suggestions are working (read the [...]

By: el_migu_el

el_migu_el — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:04:58 +0000

Hi, nice tip, thank you. Unfortunately I can not generate a nice HUGE variant of my loved Terminus font. Anybody a little help for me? :)

By: Charlie

Charlie — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:20:04 +0000

Have you noticed the difference (on Leopard) between Monaco rendered in XCode and Eclipse. The Xcode rendering of Monoco is just beautiful. I cannot stand the version Eclipse produces (same font, same size). Does anyone know how produce the Xcode result in Eclipse? Thx

By: michal

michal — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:04:33 +0000

Please help, otherwise I’m gonna get crazy.

None of these solutions worked for me.
I tried: scaling the font I use ( Lucida Sans Typewriter ), adding both entries to defaults.
Nothing.
Terminal window displays the same font perfectly, exacly the way I expect.
Any ideas?

By: eitan

eitan — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 07:57:03 +0000

thanks for the post, I’ve tried your huge font looks good but as heywood said I think you forgot to scale bold and italics. Can you pls post the font you’re using pleaseee.
Thanks.

By: bryan kennedy

bryan kennedy — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:44:43 +0000

Thanks SO much for this post. Tim’s comment above about the per application Anti Aliasing worked perfectly for me.

I wrote a little article about my search for my favorite programing font. I eventually landed on ProFont like bob. It’s real nice to not have to switch away from it as I start transitioning from BBEdit to Eclipse. Before I got this anti-aliasing figured out it didn’t look right at all in Eclipse.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 07:25:22 +0000

Heywood, just set the defaults for eclipse as follows:

defaults write org.eclipse.eclipse AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 20

I also had the same problem with the bold font type provided in the example above. This method works a treat.

By: heywood

heywood — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 15:51:25 +0000

Hey, i tried your font which looks good in eclipse but bold font seems like you didn’T scale it. That means standard font is perfect but bold is so small that it is not readable. Was there a mistake when you generated the version to download?

By: bob

bob — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 23:10:50 +0000

I’ve always liked ProFont… http://www.tobias-jung.de/seekingprofont/

By: Jens

Jens — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:30:52 +0000

Hi Roger, I have exact the same problem but using Flash as development tool. I tried your fix but it didnt work for me. I change the Flash preferences to accept font size 4 but Flash change the font to something else. In Flash, when you use Monaco 10 pt (default) font, Flash uses the bitmap font and does not seem to care about the system setting for font smoothing. My problem is that I use the 1920*1200 new MacBook Pro and Monaco 10pt is far to small. Does you or anyone else know how to use a larger bitmap font in Flash without anti-alias but still have the system setting for font smoothing to 8 or less - It would be greatly apprieciated!

/Jens

By: Roger Braunstein

Roger Braunstein — Sun, 27 May 2007 07:20:45 +0000

Well, two possibilities are here. One, Monaco isn’t a bitmap font and doesn’t have a natural size. Two, if you converted it to bitmap at 10pt and then scaled it up 300%, its natural size is 3.333333…pt, if you display it at 4pt or 3pt it’s still scaled, which you want to avoid. To get a natural aliased appearance at 10pt perhaps you should scale it 200% and display it at 5pt and turn off antialiasing for fonts under 6pt.

Otherwise, your process sounds like basically the same as mine. Hey, let me remind myself and I’ll do a screencast of this process and see if I can replicate my results from before. That would be really useful.

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 24 May 2007 21:59:09 +0000

@Raf,

I attempted to do the same thing with the Monaco font. I managed to push past your problem.

@Roger,

I figured out a set of steps, but the results look pretty bad. I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.

Steps that I did:
1. Install fontforge
2. Open /System/Library/Fonts/Monaco.dfont
3. I selected the “10 pt font” for the bitmaps (?)
4. View->10 pixel bitmap
5. Element->Font Info…
6. Change all three entries to “BigMonaco”, click ok, click “change”
7. Control-a to select all
8. Element->Transformations->Transform…
9. Change Origin to “Glyph Origin”. Click the second combo-box to select “Scale Uniformly…” and enter the value 300%
10. File->Save as… (Save to desktop)
11. File->Generate Fonts… Again, selected my Desktop directory. Made format “OpenType (Mac dfont)” and “In TTF/OTF”. Click Save.
12. Double-click on the BigMonaco.otf.dfont file on the Desktop
13. Choose “Install Font”
14. Go into Eclipse and install the font at a small size

Is it just that Monaco is a bad font for displaying without anti-aliasing?

By: Raf

Raf — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:06:47 +0000

Hi Roger,

Thanks for this tip. I tried to go ahead and do this myself using Monaco (my preferred programming font).

Not 100% sure of the steps involved in fontforge, but I opened Monaco, selected all the glyphs, did a scale of 250% (Monaco appears pixel-pixel at 10pt), went to Font Info to change the name of the font (which then asked me to generate a new UID or keep the existing one), chose to generate a random UID, saved as OTF.

Font Book won’t open the font though, but it did when I didn’t play around with Font Name / UID. Problem there is that it installed a Monaco in my user fonts, which is going to conflict with the system Monaco font.

Any tips?

Cheers.

By: Roger Braunstein

Roger Braunstein — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 13:03:20 +0000

John, that's an excellent hint, but it does control antialiasing globally, just like the Appearance panel. However, this tip gets you a lot closer to an actual solution. To disable antialiasing for all fonts in Flex Builder, you can type

defaults write com.adobe.flexbuilder AppleAntiAliasingThreshold 20

in the Terminal. Using this method, you can set antialiasing on a per-application basis. However, since the code font I use has a higher native point size (16) than the point size used in the UI (12), both will appear aliased. This may be acceptable for some. You should be able to solve this problem entirely without the use of custom fonts with the AppleSmoothFixedFontsSizeThreshold property, which sets a seperate threshold for antialiasing monospace fonts:

defaults write com.adobe.flexbuilder AppleSmoothFixedFontsSizeThreshold 20

However, this is not respected by Flex Builder, even if the property is set globally, or you would have no problems in the first place. I'm still sticking with my solution, until Flex Builder (or is it Eclipse's fault? or Java's?) starts respecting the AppleSmoothFixedFontsSizeThreshold flag.