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blurry font on yosemite

so i've upgraded to yosemite.

overall i like it, simplified and more like iOS

however the first thing that hit me is how blurry all the text is everywhere!

it's pretty awful, i'm sure it wasn't that bad with mavericks

the menu bar at the top of the screen is worse of all, i really don't understand what is going on here.it's bad and i hope it will be addressed in an update

User uploaded file

i think you can see from this screen shot how the web text is fairly clear whilst the menu bar is blurry

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10)

Posted on Oct 17, 2014 7:37 AM

Reply
206 replies

Oct 17, 2014 11:05 AM in response to Philippe Mion

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


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


User uploaded file

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.

Oct 17, 2014 8:35 PM in response to sadproz

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.

Oct 18, 2014 2:47 AM in response to Eric Westby

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.

Oct 18, 2014 3:48 AM in response to Oliver Matuschin

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/thread/6601815?answerId=26861992022#26861992022&ac_cid=tw123456#26861992

Oct 18, 2014 5:41 AM in response to Philippe Mion

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.

blurry font on yosemite

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