How can I disable font smoothing within a legend?

I want to globally disable font smoothing for all text entries within figures, since smoothed text looks very poor on my display.

I tried:

set(groot, 'DefaultTextFontSmoothing', 'off');
set(groot, 'DefaultAxesFontSmoothing', 'off');

which seems to work for xlabel(), title(), etc. but not for the text within legends.

I am using Matlab R2015a.

Answer 1

[Brian C Coe]

function [leg,labelhandles,outH,outM] = legend2(varargin)
% function [leg,labelhandles,outH,outM] = legend2(varargin)
% quite possibly the stupidest code i ever had to hack-up to get around a matlab stupidity.
% call 'legend2' instead of 'legend' to remove the noisy font smoothing.
% still can't figure out how to remove the graphicssmoothing, however.
% 2019may31 ~bcoe

if isempty(varargin)
    help(mfilename)
    return
end

[leg,labelhandles,outH,outM] = legend(varargin{:});

for ii=1:length(leg.ItemText)
    leg.ItemText(ii).FontSmoothing='off';
    % leg.ItemTokens(ii).graphicssmoothing='off'; %still trying to kill linesmoothing
end

call 'legend2' instead of 'legend'... (-sigh-)

Answer 2

[Cindy Solomon]

Hi HoBe,

In order to turn off the font smoothing of a legend, you can set the FontSmoothing property of a text object that is a child of the legend. For example:

plot(1:10)
[h,objs] = legend('one')
objs(1).FontSmoothing='off'

Since the legend is no longer a child of the axis, changing the FontSmoothing property of the axis does not have any impact on the legend. Hope this helps!

[HoBe]

Hi Cindy,

thanks for your answer. This solution works for me as a workaround. However, is there a way to turn off font smoothing of legends on a global level? I would expect that

set(groot, 'DefaultTextFontSmoothing', 'off');

should do the job, but it does not.