Recently we upgraded our Office 2001 to version X on our
Mac OS X. We now noticed that the characters in the Word
are a bit fuzzy, like there's a shadow behind them. We
don't have this problem with the other softwares, eg.
acrobat, eudora, pagemaker, etc. Only on word. Even the
Excel seems OK. Any idea?
Clifford
Hi Clifford,
See the explanation below from a previous post by John McGhie.
--
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP
Mac Word FAQ: <
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/WordMac/index.htm>
Entourage Help Page: <
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/toc.html>
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I'm lost with the Quartz thing (is that the cool name for 10.1.5?),
It is "part" of OS 10.1.5. The Quartz "engine" is the PostScript engine
that draws the screen display. The engine is new in 10.1.5 and is now
capable of performing font smoothing to make displayed text look better on
low-res CRT screens.
Unfortunately, it handles Type 1 fonts extremely badly, and it is this which
is causing the anguish.
but I'm certainly having trouble with text. I just switched computers
(from a blue G3 to a new flat-screen G4 iMac)-- installed the OS X
upgrade (10.1.5), installed SR1-- font rendering is *terrible*.
Everything has fuzzy edges.
Go to System Preferences>General and set "Turn off text smoothing..." to a
high value (36 or some such). That effectively disables it.
I tried the Silk haxie (on a coworker's recommendation) and it doesn't
seem to help. Does the flat screen make a difference?
Yes. Font smoothing is a technique that works only if you know the screen
resolution of the display device. I think the Quartz smoothing is set up to
work best at 1024 x 768 on a CRT screen.
On an LCD screen, the display has a fixed number of pixels (1024 x 768 on
the iMac I think). Using a CRT display, the pixels are round, and their
"size" depends on how bright they are. You can use this to place small
"gray" pixels arond the outline of the letter to smooth the edges of the
curves so they do not appear "pixelated". On an LCD screen, you can't
really use this technique because the pixels are square and of fixed size.
So Font Smoothing (even when it works) is disappointing on an LCD screen.
Turn it off
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