Smoothing looks different than system's, when using NSString drawAtPoint:

Question

I have a custom status item view where I draw a string using NSString's drawAtPoint:withAttributes:. When comparing to the system clock with the same text, it seems that my text is missing subpixel smoothing and looks sort of grainy. I found an advice to shift drawing point from (x,y) to (x+0.5,y+0.5), but it did not help. Default view and setTitle: produce the same result.

That's how it looks:

Seems that system clock has some light gray border below, but I could not imitate it by drawing a string the second time with light gray color.

Answer 1

I don't see any "font smoothing" in the system's rendering, or in any menu titles on my machine. If it was turned on, you'd see red and blue tinted pixels at the edges of the characters, instead of just gray. The difference is quite obvious when zoomed in.

You may want to experiment with turning subpixel positioning and quantization on or off, using CGContextSetShouldSubpixelPositionFonts, CGContextSetShouldSubpixelQuantizeFonts, etc.

Otherwise, the main difference really is that faint white shadow in the system's rendering. Try setting the context's shadow to an offset of {0,1} (or maybe {0,-1} if your context is flipped?), blur of 0 or 1, and a color of 100% white at 30% alpha -- that looks pretty close to me.