Antialiasing problems with light text on a dark background (OS/X 10.10)?

Antialiasing problems with light text on a dark background (OS/X 10.10)?

[Stuart Hungerford]

Hi,

I've been trying out Emacs installed through Homebrew on OS/X 10.10
(both the standard Gnu version and the Emacs-mac variant).

Using light text on a near black background the text is rendered very
bold and thick.  The same font (Inconsolata opentype) in the same
colors and the same text looks much thinner with Terminal.app and
Sublime Text. I've also discovered this bug report which I think is
still open:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2014-10/msg01082.html

Has anyone else experienced this issue?  Are there any work-arounds I'm missing?

Any advice much appreciated.

[I've also posted this message to the Emacs OS/X mailing list,
apologies if you're seeing it twice.]

Stu

Re: Antialiasing problems with light text on a dark background (OS/X 10.10)?

[John Mastro]

Stuart Hungerford <stuart.hungerford@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been trying out Emacs installed through Homebrew on OS/X 10.10
> (both the standard Gnu version and the Emacs-mac variant).
>
> Using light text on a near black background the text is rendered very
> bold and thick.  The same font (Inconsolata opentype) in the same
> colors and the same text looks much thinner with Terminal.app and
> Sublime Text. I've also discovered this bug report which I think is
> still open:
>
> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2014-10/msg01082.html
>
> Has anyone else experienced this issue?  Are there any work-arounds I'm missing?

My read of that bug report is that the reporter believed that setting
the normal font got them the bold one and vice versa.

If that's correct, and is the same thing affecting you, you could work
around it somewhat by setting the bold font, thereby getting the normal
one.

Not a perfect workaround, but maybe an improvement over the status quo.

-- 
john

Re: Antialiasing problems with light text on a dark background (OS/X 10.10)?

[Stuart Hungerford]

On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 7:32 AM, John Mastro <john.b.mastro@gmail.com> wrote:

> Stuart Hungerford <stuart.hungerford@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've been trying out Emacs installed through Homebrew on OS/X 10.10
>> (both the standard Gnu version and the Emacs-mac variant).
>>
>> Using light text on a near black background the text is rendered very
>> bold and thick.  The same font (Inconsolata opentype) in the same
>> colors and the same text looks much thinner with Terminal.app and
>> Sublime Text. I've also discovered this bug report which I think is
>> still open:
>>
>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2014-10/msg01082.html
>>
>> Has anyone else experienced this issue?  Are there any work-arounds I'm missing?
>
> My read of that bug report is that the reporter believed that setting
> the normal font got them the bold one and vice versa.
>
> If that's correct, and is the same thing affecting you, you could work
> around it somewhat by setting the bold font, thereby getting the normal
> one.
>
> Not a perfect workaround, but maybe an improvement over the status quo.

Thanks for replying--much appreciated.

My experience has been that both normal weight and bold weight fonts
are way too thick and bold (compared with other OS/X applications), so
I took that bug report to indicate something is wrong with emacs font
antialiasing on OS/X even though my experience is slightly different.

I've found that Adobe Source Code Pro has an "extra light" weight
which I'm using for now, but would prefer to stick Inconsolata if I
can.

Thanks,

Stu