How To: Get anti-aliased fonts in the Arduino and Processing IDE’s

Problem:

Arduino and Processing IDE’s both are java applications and don’t use anti-aliasing when displaying fonts on OS X.

Solution:

Add the Java Swing options to enable anti aliasing to the Info.plist file that OS X uses to launch the IDE’s.

Steps:
Right click the Arduino.app in the Finder and select ‘Show Package Contents’, double click the Contents directory and there you will find the Info.plist file. Open it in a text editor of your choice.
Add the following two lines under the Java option. See the screenshot for the exact location.

<key>VMOptions</key>
<string>-Dswing.aatext=true
</string>

UpdatePlistScreenShot

Now your code editor goes from looking like this crapness:

noaliasing

To this hotness:

withantialiasing

And even better you can use great looking fonts like Inconsolata and get an editor that looks this good:
inconsolasarduino

3 comments

  1. You’re into Processing and Arduino, too?! Awesome! Hope you blog more about any Arduino stuff you do!

    3-4 weeks ago, I was at hacknight in Phoenix and was able to get some Processing->Arduino stuff working — using mouse interaction (click/position) to remotely control my Arduino Mega.

  2. I just completed a few pretty cool hardware prototypes using Arduino’s for the brains.

    I’ll see how much I can share with the world and hopefully post some pics/videos.

    -josh

  3. Josh–Thanks for this. I was hoping someone had figured this out already. In Processing 1.0.9, and maybe some previous releases as well, there is already a VMOptions section, so I just added the
    -Dswing.aatext=true
    into the array.

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