Mac – Why is the “black” text on the Mac made up of so many different colors

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My Mac has this nifty "zoom" function that kicks in when I hold control and scroll in and out. If I zoom all the way in on black text on my screen, it is made up of many different colors. Why is this?

Here is an example of the colors

Best Answer

The Mac is rendering text using subpixel resolution. See these explanations for instance:

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Mac – Turn off Anti-Aliasing on Mac

You can manually turn off font-antialiasing with this terminal command:

defaults write CoreGraphics CGFontDisableAntialiasing YES

to turn antialiasing back on again use this:

defaults write CoreGraphics CGFontDisableAntialiasing NO

Why will Text Edit and other apps prevent me from choosing text colors

Do you save your files as .txt (i.e., plain text)? In this case you cannot change colors, because .txt cannot store them, only information that a .txt file can hold are ASCII/UTF-8 characters, no particular formatting.

But you can choose colors if you convert your text into "Rich text" (.rtf file). To do so, click on Format in the Menubar of TextEdit, and select Make Rich Text. Alternatively, you could also press the shortcut shift+command+T in TextEdit.

Best Answer

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Mac – Turn off Anti-Aliasing on Mac

Why will Text Edit and other apps prevent me from choosing text colors

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