OS X Font Smoothing

Love the font smoothing in OS X. I use flat panel displays at work and always enable the 'Medium' font smoothing `cause it looks nicer on the LCD. I have noticed, though, that sometimes fonts aren't smoothed in Medium style, but rather 'Standard' style, like my preference is ignored and the system default is used instead. Examples are system dialogs like Logout, Restart, Shutdown, the Dock, and Dashboard widgets. I'm told this is also true of all PowerPC apps emulated under Rosetta on the MacIntels.

I figured this is because these dialogs were either shown by a system process or by a process created by the system then chown'ed to me, and that the Window Manager was using root's appearance preferences for font smoothing rather than mine.

I tested this theory. I launched System Preferences as root and lo and behold, the Appearance preference Font Smoothing setting was 'Automatic'. I changed it to 'Medium' the way I like it, and lo again, System Dialogs now have 'Medium' smooth fonts. To try it yourself, open the Terminal and type:

sudo /Applications/System\ Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System\ Preferences

Enter your password when prompted. Then go adjust root's preferences as needed.