My better half and I recently upgraded our personal computers from aging Sony Vaio laptops, to twin 2013 iMacs. We’ve wanted to dip our feet in the OS X waters for some time now, and this seemed to be a good opportunity.

I’d always supposed Apple Macs to be a paragon of typography perfection, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the great “fuzzy font” controversy surrounding recent OS X releases.

There’s a lot been written about this elsewhere so I won’t repeat it:

Anyway, the problem seems to be particularly noticeable when light text on a dark background is used. Unfortunately, this directly affects my Prodigal Sounds family of web sites.

Thanks to a post by Tim Van Damme, I found a work-around: to add a block to the web site’s CSS stylesheet:

html {
-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
}

This seems to force the browser (at least, Safari and Chrome) to work as though the LCD font smoothing option was turned off, and the text is more readable for those browsing on Macs, even if they have the LCD font smoothing option enabled.

If you’re on a Mac, you can see the results here at www.prodigalsounds.com.