Major font problems suddenly

this has happened to me on and off before, but always went away. Suddenly almost all my fonts on my comp. seem like they are bolder/bigger than normal. This happened out of the blue, I didnt change anything. In the Finder, in all different programs, on the net. Fonts that were once small seem like they have been bolded even brighter in some cases. Its the wierdest thing. I tried messing with font smoothing. If I basically turn it off the fonts seem better cause their not smooth. but i never changed any setting and this just happened. any ideas?

Have you run any of the recent updates? Also do you have Adobe Creative suite installed?

You might have accidentally made them bigger, try using cmd and - and see if that makes them smaller.

I have the same problem. I have a Powerbook G4 12", and just reinstalled OS X and ran all updates. I removed the duplicate fonts in Font Book, calibrated the screen, and I still have the problem. Any ideas?

Do you guys have scroll wheels on your mice? Because if you hold the apple key and scroll in and out while in your browser, the text gets larger and smaller depending on which way you scroll.

I don't use an external mouse so no scroll wheel. I checked in Safari and Firefox (which is my browser of choice) and it happens in both. In Firefox, if you press Command + (zero) it will return to default size. I have done that and checked that the default sizes were not fooled with and both look fine to me. I have attached a screenshot if it helps to see what I mean. Many people claim that Mac font rendering isn't up to par with PCs and what not...but before I reinstalled OS X it looked a heck of a lot better.

PS - In my screencap, the one thing that really bothers me are the headings (ex: Google CEO joins Apples board)...they used to look alot smoother and didn't seem to run together...the rest of the text looks somewhat normal. All of it looked better before reinstallation though. It is not limited to the site in my screenshot either - it applies to all sites and my system menus and such.

Ok, well with the trackpad, if you hold one finger down on it and take another finger and slide that finger up and down on the trackpad, that will scroll too. Is it possible that you did that while holding the apple key?

I also found that Command + Shift + -/= will do the same thing.

I've included a screenshot of what happened to me when I held command and scrolled.

I know how my trackpad works and no I did not do that. I even did a Command + Zero as I stated in my previous post which returns to the default font size in Firefox which I checked and it was Helvetica 16pt. This was the default on a fresh install which is the same as I had it on my previous incarnation of OS X. It looked much better before and I'm baffled as to why.

adamscottmartin said:

I know how my trackpad works and no I did not do that. I even did a Command + Zero as I stated in my previous post which returns to the default font size in Firefox which I checked and it was Helvetica 16pt. This was the default on a fresh install which is the same as I had it on my previous incarnation of OS X. It looked much better before and I'm baffled as to why.

Click to expand...

After I ran my first updates on my new Mac and restarted it, the screen flickers going from normal font size, to huge font size, then back to normal, it does this for about 3/4 times until it eventually goes back to the normal font. Do you think this is related? That it might be the updates?