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4: System Preferences - Appearance

The Appearance preferences under System Preferences give you the options of changing text color, highlights, scroll bar functionality, recent item preferences, and text smoothing.
Setting the options:


  • Appearance sets the color for buttons, scroll bars, menus, and windows for the OS and applications.
  • Highlight Color sets the color for highlighted fields in text documents, web pages, lists, etc…
  • Place Scroll Arrows dictates where the scroll arrows are located.
    • At top and bottom
    • Together
  • Click in the scroll bar to:
    • "Jump to the next page" will scroll to the next window or page of the document
    • "Jump to here" scrolls to the relative position in the document. So if you clicked halfway down you would scroll halfway through the document.
  • Use smooth scrolling will scroll the contents smoothly without jumping.
  • Minimize when double clicking a window title bar minimizes a window to the dock when you double click the toolbar.
  • Number of recent items will set the number of items you want the OS to consider recent when displaying recent Applications and Documents. You can set this from 0 to 50. Recent items are a submenu of the Apple Menu
  • Font smoothing style determines how the OS will smooth the text
    Turn off text smoothing for font sizes * and smaller. The smaller the number the more font smoothing will be done.

Read more articles about System Preferences

System Preferences
System Preferences - Software Update
System Preferences - CDs & DVDs
System Preferences - Date & Time
System Preferences - Desktop & Screen Saver
System Preferences - Displays
System Preferences - Energy Saver
System Preferences - International
System Preferences - Keyboard & Mouse
System Preferences - Dock
System Preferences - Speech
System Preferences - Sound
System Preferences - Startup Disk
System Preferences - Dashboard & Exposé
System Preferences - Sharing

This article was last edited on Jun-06-2006 7:08 pm
This article can be referenced by its article number: 4 or by any of the following keywords: system preferences, appearance.