Q: blurry font on yosemite

I agree completely.  The new font is blurry and a huge disappointment.  I loved my iMac because it was a delight to read text and now it's blurry and the smaller fonts are hard to read.

Same.

I'm on a 27" iMac (2009). Almost anywhere where there is transparency, the fonts can't render properly—it's blurry and hard to read. Makes me feel like I'm going blind.

Apple HAS to change this. I'm sure it looks beautiful on retina screens but most iMacs, for example, aren't retina.

Ok, I found a 90%-solution, but it requires eliminating the transparency effect.

1. Go to System Preferences > Accessibility
2. Check "Reduce transparency"

You can toggle it on and off to see that it does, in fact, improve font rendering where there once was transparency. Unfortunately it's a 90% solution, because things like the right-click menu are still rendering blurry fonts. I hope this is fixed in an update asap.

Try this: go to System Preferences > General > Uncheck "Use LCD font smoothing when available". It seems to make a slight difference on my computer.

Doesn't make a difference for me.

Here's a screenshot showing, despite my solution above, still some text remains a blur. Notice the sub-menu items are blurry, but the Accessibility window underneath is sharp.

What is going on Apple?

UPDATE: Ignore my post above unless you have the same issue. It seems restarting my Mac fixed the blurry-fonts issue.

Try it and update us. Thanks.

Apple doesn’t routinely monitor the discussions. These are mostly user to user discussions.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.

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I see the same effect on my 24" iMac from 2007. My MacBook from 2009 does not show this behavior.

However, after restarting my iMac the problem seems to be gone for a while. So I guess it is a bug which will hopefully be fixed with one of the next updates of Yosemite.

As Alexyorke mentioned above, it's the "LCD Font Smoothing" option that causes this blurry effect on non-retina monitors. I've never understood why it's even there. But as you learned, you have to restart to see everything change. That's why restarting seemed to fix it.

But it wasn't restarting alone that fixed it: it was restarting after turning off LCD Font Smoothing. If you want confirmation, just turn it back on and restart yet again, and you'll see the blurriness again.

FWIW, this is the same behavior as in earlier versions of Mac OS X, but it wasn't nearly as noticeable since the system font was chunkier.

In my opinion it's definitely a bug. The problem is gone after a restart of the machine, but reappears after a while. When I restart my Mac the fonts look absolutely normal, just what they used to look like on OS X Mavericks. Then, like half an hour later, they suddenly start to look blurry / smeared.

This has nothing to do with the LCD Font Smoothing, at least in my case.

Yosemite's UI was clearly optimized for use on Retina / 5K screens. The design choice of Helvetica screams this out ... And I'm beginning to question if Ive is out of his waters being handed the reigns to U/I design & user experience  as well as product design. While both design based, humanistic disciplines, they are not the same discipline and require vastly different skill sets.

  His predecessor, Forster(?) understood U/I design and didn't design products for a reason. And as we know Jobs really had a firm understanding of how the eye works (young and old eyes)  and the importance of typset and calligraphy

Not to get too sidetracked though, yes, Yosemite is blurrier than Mavericks on non-retina displays and no, your complaint is not isolated either. It folds into the overall font size complaints over Yosemite. Would like to get Apple cranking on this usability update ASAP. My eyes physically hurt after 2 hours

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6603949?searchText=Font

https://discussions.apple.com/message/26861992?ac_cid=tw123456#26861992

This font rendering looks cute when you look at the desktop menus, buttons and paragraphs as a whole picture but causes eye pain for text reading.

It seems that apple chooses aesthetic over readability.

I cannot understand why 5K screen optimisation is done with antialiased font or font smoothing. IMHO highest definition reach indiscernible pixel whereby simple black and white font rendering is sufficient.