Augh! Don't Mess With Monaco!
The Monaco10 font has always been a godsend to programmers and Unix nerds in the Macintosh world. It's one of the better fixed width fonts out there and it's what I use in BBEdit and Terminal.app. Somewhere after the last Mac OS X update, however, Apple seems to have screwed something up royally in their font rendering. It's completely unclear why it happens and even when it happens, but in some situations the curly brace characters are completely out of whack in Terminal and iTerm, with the closing brace completely distorted, to wit:
This is completely unacceptable. Restarting the Terminal doesn't work (once the distortion shows up, it even shows up in Font Book).
There's also good news, though, in the form of a workaround: Set the font size for your Terminal windows at 10.1 instead of 10.0 and the distortion will be gone. For the finishing touch, you may want to give a slight nudge against the line spacing slider to balance things out.
Turning on anti-aliasing will also fix the problem, but this looks kind of dorky on a 10pt font.
Update: The macosxhints.com site republished this tip and someone there came up with the ATS cache being the real culprit here. Cleaning up everything in /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS/${UID} seems to fix the problem as well.
ArsPriori
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
