displayfontmacosterminal
I am one of the many who have extremely blurry fonts on external displays connected to my 2014 MacBook Pro. The solution for me has always been to follow this guide which runs a ruby script and puts the result in an overrides folder.
EDIT: By turning off the new "rootless" feature of El Capitan I was able to gain access to the overrides folder, however it does not appear to have worked. Anyone had any luck fixing the blurry fonts on external displays for El Capitan?
As its on a VGA connection, it may not be aliasing or the resolution, but could be the phase of the monitor. It should have settings on he monitor itself to auto configure or manually adjust things like this. Do you have the ability to reset the monitor via an OSD?
Toggling LCD font smoothing (subpixel rendering) should have an immediate effect on the System Preferences window with most displays.
LCD font smoothing is not enabled automatically on some LCD displays though. You might be able to force them to use it with defaults write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 2, which corresponds to the pre-10.6 medium setting or enabling LCD font smoothing on most displays.
10.5 used to allow choosing from two additional text rendering settings, light and strong. If the default was light before you upgraded to 10.8, you can restore it with defaults write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 1.
High Resolution Guidelines for OS X: Advanced Optimization Techniques
In OS X v10.8, the default value of the
NSFontDefaultScreenFontSubstitutionEnabledsetting isNO. This setting determines whether or not text APIs (such asNSLayoutManager,NSCell, and theNSStringDrawingcategories onNSStringandNSAttributedString) substitute screen fonts when calculating layout and display of text.Although screen font substitution will no longer be the default, using screen font might still be appropriate to support:
- Compatibility with documents created with previous versions of your app. The difference in glyph advancement measurements between integral and floating-point values can cause a change in text layout.
- Fixed-pitch plain text style output—for example, the Plain Text mode in Text Edit. To keep the OS X v10.7 screen font substitution behavior as the default, set the
NSUserDefaultskeyNSFontDefaultScreenFontSubstitutionEnabledto YES.To maintain the screen font setting on a per-document basis, specify
NSUsesScreenFontsDocumentAttributeas a document attribute when you initialize an attributed string object.
defaults write -g NSFontDefaultScreenFontSubstitutionEnabled -bool true didn't seem to have (almost) any effect in most applications. But for some reason it disabled kerning in AppleScript Editor.
Best Answer
The location of the
Overridesdirectory changed to/System/Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/Overrides/. Note that you will need to disable System Integrity Protection to add files there.