[OS X TeX] OS X 10.10.3

[Richard Seguin]

> On Apr 16, 2015, at 12:48 PM, Michael Sharpe <msharpe at ucsd.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Apr 15, 2015, at 10:10 AM, Richard Seguin <riseguin at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> 
>> I’ve noticed that slight adjustments to the width of the preview window still has slight effects on the rendering of the fonts. This is true with both Skim and TeXShop, although the effect with Skim seems to be a little bit more noticeable than with TeXShop on my system.
>> 
>> With 10.10.3, the fonts look good whether you tweak it this way or not.
>> 
>> Richard
>> 
> 
> The update to 10.10.3 is definitely worthwhile, but there I still see some odd issues. If you checked "Use LCD font smoothing where available" in System Preferences/General and started TeXShop/Skim/Preview while it was checked, the general effect with those PDFKit-based programs and a non-retina display is to thicken the appearance of fonts, noticeably reducing their contrast (ratio of thickest to thinnest strokes,) giving the fonts the appearance of generic web fonts. With some fonts that have been well-behaved using other programs like Adobe Reader, or other platforms, the opposite effect is seen with some glyphs, making them appear ghostly at smaller sizes. This was the case, for example, with the numeral 5 in newpxtext. I discovered after banging my head for days that the problem could be fixed by making the conversion to .pfb using cfftot1 rather than FontForge. All you need to do is replace zplr.pfb in the texlive distribution with the new one from
> 
> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3825336/TeX/index.html
> 
> It is unfortunate that I found this too late to make it into the initial texlive 2015.
> 
> Michael

Michael,

You are right about the general thickening in appearance. I noted something similar in a previous post. I discovered that slightly changing the width of the window in Skim can modulate and slightly improve this with my MinionPro fonts (single page mode with a small border surrounding the document). The Bickham Script Pro fonts that you helped me set up are even more thickened, to the point where regular weight looks like semibold. (I think we used FontForge.) It’s not a disaster — this is much easier on my aging eyes than pre-10.10.3.

Richard Séguin