System Preferences - Appearances

The appearance preferences in the System Preference allow you to change the color of text, highlights, scroll bar functionality, recent item preferences, and text smoothing. In previous versions of OS X to Panther, this was called the General preferences.

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
  • Scroll 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.