Can we disable/reduce Editor font smoothing (R2021b)?

Is there a way to disable or reduce font smoothing / antialiasing in the Matlab Editor?

I know there are somewhat related questions, restore-old-editor-in-r2021b, monospaced-font-seems-different-in-different-matlab-versions, matlab-font-2021b.

Compared to the Command Window and e.g. the Editor in R2020a, the Editor in R2021b now renders fonts differently, with an overly smoothed result that I find quite fatiguing at least on my display.

The strength of the effect differs depending on the font (top: Editor, bottom: Command Window).

(The appearance is not perfectly reproduced here due to the inherent lossy image compression on Matlab Answers.)

Answer 1

[Ashutosh Singh Baghel]

Hi Andres,

To disable the "font smoothing / antialiasing" in the Matlab Editor in Linux, deselect the option "Use antialiasing to smooth desktop fonts" . On Microsoft® Windows® and macOS platforms, MATLAB uses system setting for antialiasing.

For further information, please refer to the following Documentation Page.

[Andres]

Thank you for your answer.

On my Windows 10 machine, (de-)activating ClearType, or "Smooth edges of screen fonts" (in advanced system settings -> Performance (Visual Effects, ...) -> Visual Effects -> Custom), or using "Better ClearType Tuner" only affects the font rendering in the Command window, but not inside the Editor window. The Editor's font rendering always looks slightly different and laterally compressed. But okay, probably I'll have to get used to it.

[Ashutosh Singh Baghel]

Hi Andres,

The effects of action you mentioned above only affect the font rendering in the command window. MATLAB needs to be restarted for the effects to be displayed in MATLAB Editor too.

[Andres]

Hi Ashutosh,

thanks for the hint about the restart.

[Zhaoyang Xiang]

I am using an R2021b Update 2 version, and met with the same problem. The "overly-rendered" font in the Editor window never changed even if I tried to modify the "anti-aliasing" settings and restart everything, while in the Command window the font can be changed instantly.

Especially, I noticed that several fonts displayed as the same "Consolas-like" font, such as Consolas, Lucida Sans, and Monospaced, which basically means that those fonts cannot display as expected.

[Jelmer Kuiper]

In my case, finetuning and restart did not fix the blurry rendering in the editor. Using 2021b However the documentation does give a good hint saying "monospaced" (default font) is rendered differently in the editor compared to the command window. Documentation Page.

Changing font to "Courier New" did the trick. Both rendering the same now: sharp text. In a slightly different font