Really happy with mac but courier new font looks really wierd?

[dothedru22]

Hey guys I've been doing programming for a long time and I've always used courier new on all my pcs. I love the font for programming. When I select this font to be used in Netbeans(or any other ide) the font is to light and unreadable. I thought it may have been what courier new mac used so I actually deleted the font and got the font off my windows 7 machine and installed it. Still no dice. I'm wondering how I can get that nice looking courier new on mac. Thanks.

It should look something like this

 

[DarkestRitual]

No, it should look like my signature image. At least, that's how it has always looked on a mac.

 

[DarkestRitual]

Those also appear to be the same font, OS X just uses better font smoothing techniques, so it looks cleaner.

 

[Jamie-Jamie]

Go to System Preferences and open Appearance. At the bottom is a setting for font smoothing. Set it to "Light" and see if that suits your tastes better!

You'll need to quit and re-open any app that you want to see a change in, as it won't switch on-the-fly.

 

[dothedru22]

Hey guys I appreciate the replies but I the only thing I see related to fonts in the appearance tab is "use lcd font smoothing when available". It's either on or off. Other than that it says do not smooth below 4 point font. I see nothing about light and other things. I'm using snow leopard.

edit: I found a place where I could re-write the font smoothing settings

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

this is the command . It's 0 - 4 or 0-3. I changed all types of settings but the font is still extremely light.

 

[MacInWin]

Just out of curiosity, is the font size the same in both? The widths of the samples are different, and frankly the first one looks a point smaller than then second to these eyes.

 

[dothedru22]

The font is actually pretty light at all sizes. Even at 14,15,16, etc.

This is the difference in courier and courier new. I wish the courier new was around this same darkness.

 

[technologist]

If you must have Courier, give up on Microsoft's "Courier New" and use the proper version of Courier included with Mac OS X.

Better yet, switch to some other font better suited to writing code, like Apple's Monaco, or the new-in-Snow-Leopard Menlo, or even Microsoft's Consolas. Something where zeros don't look like Os and lowercase Ls don't look like ones.

 

[DarkestRitual]

Good advice from technologist.

Anyway, yes, we told you exactly where you need to go. Turn off font smoothing for size 4 and smaller? Bump that size up to whatever size font you don't want smoothed. Probably 12 and smaller.

 

[TechieJustin]

Is there really such a thing as a lazy dog?

 

[dothedru22]

Yea guys none of this worked. Thanks for the replies though. I guess I'll be forced to use Windows 7 on bootcamp. I physically cannot code if it is not courier new. Blame visual studio 6

 

[Jamie-Jamie]

Yea guys none of this worked. Thanks for the replies though. I guess I'll be forced to use Windows 7 on bootcamp. I physically cannot code if it is not courier new. Blame visual studio 6

... You can't be serious. So if the font and the anti-aliasing algorithm isn't identical you can't type things?

Okay. Well, good luck!

 

[dothedru22]

... You can't be serious. So if the font and the anti-aliasing algorithm isn't identical you can't type things?

Okay. Well, good luck!

Yea I'm very serious sadly. The courier new font on mac is just to light. I just don't understand. Honestly I think all the font is really over aliased compared to something like Windows or Gnome(Linux).

 

[DarkestRitual]

Yea, I guess that's probably part of why my Mac has never made me entirely blind. The font is smooth and natural instead of heavy as heck and pixely. Your problem is you're coding in size 13. Did you bump the minimum smoothing and drop your coding font size to 12?

 

[Jamie-Jamie]

It sounds as though he's just incredibly particular about the exact font he uses. He just simply can't be happy with something that isn't 100% identical to what he's used to. It would be like if you couldn't drive your car if someone put a red cover on your seat.

Personally, I hope that he loosens up and finds himself able to not be quite so... um... I don't mean this meanly, but... picky.

 

[DarkestRitual]

Yea... it sounds like he just wants to complain about something because the transition may not be as smooth as he had hoped?

Either way, the problem was presented and solved. Next question.

 

[dothedru22]

Yea... it sounds like he just wants to complain about something because the transition may not be as smooth as he had hoped?

Either way, the problem was presented and solved. Next question.

Na man. That's simply not the case. I'm sorry if courier new looks fine on every flavor of windows and every linux distro I've found but not on Mac OS. You can't tell me that the font smoothing is better when it makes courier new look so light you can't even read it. I've tried everything I've read in these forums and on google and nothing works. I'm not sure what is wrong. I thought the transition went well anyway. It's just this one thing that really gets me.

 

[DarkestRitual]

I can read it and have been doing so for years. Looks fine to me. Anyway, just noticed the username... nice. Sorry I was a little disagreeable with that post. Anyway, size down your font one point and turn off the smoothing. Unless that didn't work, in which case... use a better font?

 

[TechieJustin]

Guys, I don't think he's complaining just for the sake of complaining; he simply didn't like that particular font.
I see what he means now that I can take a better look at it. The Mac's courier font looked thin and a bit blurry. I remember having a similar issue when I upgraded to a new laptop a few years ago and the screen was better at rendering various fonts.

 

[ZorroAMG]

OCD perhaps? Best of luck.