[OS X TeX] OS X 10.10.2 - font smoothing?

[Richard Seguin]

> On Jan 27, 2015, at 6:18 PM, Richard Seguin <riseguin at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> I won’t be able to install this for a day or two. Has it fixed the font smoothing problem in TeXShop, Skim, and Preview? Months ago I speculated that it might not be fixed until .3.
> 
> Richard

I finally had the time to install 10.10.2. There has been no change to font smoothing in TeXShop, Skim, and Preview, so they have not dealt yet with PDFKit.

(I currently have a Dell 2415 1920x1200 IPS display connected to my old MBP.)

However, the text within the source window of TeXShop seems to have improved a lot in appearance. Up through 10.10.1font smoothing in the source window seemed to have the same problem as PDF viewers. They must have fixed font smoothing within whatever system text edit APIs that TeXShop uses. (BBEdit has always displayed smooth text under Yosemite; I think they use their own custom text code.) I might be imaging it, but I think they’ve also improved font smoothing in the message area of Mail. Also, I noticed that font smoothing looked a lot better after one of the last two updates to Pages since Yosemite was rolled out. They must have fixed it in that application. So, I’m guessing that they are fixing font smoothing problems bit by bit, and hopefully PDFKit will be next.

Of course, if you’re brave, and still have a Mavericks system available, you can replace Yosemite's PDFKit with Mavericks’ PDFKit, and solve all these problems:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/151995/finer-control-of-preview-anti-aliasing-font-smoothing

Last night I discovered a way to make Skim look about as good as the TeXShop viewer, and I’ll write a separate post on that later in the day. (Neither of these though still look as good as they should with decent font smoothing.)

Richard Séguin