Q: blurry font on yosemite

It is also bad for retinas, I am having less eye strain on Mavericks.

Just updated to Yosemite from Mavericks and agree fonts look horrible on my non-retina 27" iMac.

Searching the web it is obvious that many people have a problem with this yet no solution months later. 

I turned off font smoothing which helped, but fonts are still too small and Apple's choice of font is well...

"Microsoft Stupid" 

Love Apple and it hurts me to be critical....but WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

Big mistake, after all you did not have to upgrade.

Apple and Microsoft, they of course affect each other. Microsoft changed from Arial (XP) to calibri (win7), thinking a change. Calibri "looks"  better especially in larger fonts like in power point, and narrower, thus not good choice for readability/writing perspective.  That's why in academia it is not the font for writing/reading grants or papers.

Similarly there is a trend now making fonts thinner, narrower, etc, since "it looks good" but when you want to read and write, it is a bad option. Apple's font choice was much better than Microsoft until Yosemite, fonts were fatter and darker (bolder) looking easier for eye compared to Windows. Now they made thinner (most likely there are fashion people working for them), paler (grayer), which decreased the contrast with respect to background, and they chose helvetica, which is narrower, thus will be harder for eye if you want to separate the fonts or characters. The page might looking good if you are looking like an artist, but harder to read if you are looking like a person who just wants to understand the content.

Just look at the fonts in this page, dark gray and thinner fonts on a white/white gray background, very clever!...

I inserted 2 images that obtained by the screen shots of two different webpages (same story), who use old style font rendering (regular dark) vs new style, thinner and grayer, that has been becoming popularity but hopefully will be abandoned. Yosemite uses some  way of thinned fonts too, which makes the readability harder. These screenshots were obtained on a macbook pro retina with Mavericks on it. Please see (Apple) how hard it is to read the thin fonts, differences can be very striking when the size is small (I resized the images so that fonts sizes are approximately similar, which made the texts blurry, but just check the contrast).

findik,

I don't see any screenshots of fonts in your message.

Nate

I've been experimenting with a couple of ways to make the Yosemite UI less obnoxious. One thing that helps is to replace the default system font with something more legible. There are now a couple of ways to do this. Of course you try such things at your own risk, but the two I've tried have worked pretty well.

One involves an app called YosemiteRevert (it's $2). Among other things, it will let you have Lucida Grande back. That's a big improvement, to my eyes, but the app still has a few glitches.

A simpler approach is this one: http://www.thegraphicmac.com/change-os-x-yosemites-default-system-font. I just tried this one with my other Yosemite test drive, and it works as advertised.

Another solution takes the same approach, but uses Source Sans instead of Fira Sans:

https://github.com/kemie/Source-Sans-Yosemite-System-Font-Replacement

And here is another: http://input.fontbureau.com/systemfont/

These three options just involve placing the fonts in /Library/Fonts, then logging out and logging back in. Reverting to Helvetica Neue is a matter of removing the replacement fonts from /Library/Fonts. (Note: Library/Fonts, NOT User/Library/Fonts).

Nathan, attachment is shown as inline text. If you look at the top text, 1-individual characters are thinner, 2. grayer.

Thank you for posting this.

My pleasure.

I find it encouraging that people are working on ways to work around the more problematic changes to the UI.

Okay, now I see what you have done. Very well-illustrated!

At first, I thought you were saying that you had actually used a medical instrument to examine the font differences between Yosemite and Mavericks. (Which would also be a good idea.)

Nate

kahjot, have you tried that YosemiteRevert?

What are your impressions of it?

Nate

Nathan Silverman wrote:

 

kahjot, have you tried that YosemiteRevert?

 

What are your impressions of it?

 

I tried it on one of my Yosemite guinea pigs. It seems promising, but they are having some issues with the Lucida Grande part of it. Today I was notified of another update, with this description:

This update:

Removes the ability to revert some system fonts (Lucida Grande Regular and Bold) until we can work out the bugs

Bugs that will be fixed soon:

• YosemiteRevert will not re-run after an OS X update
• TextEdit icon is not replaced
• Other bugs listed on the "Known Bugs" section of our website

Thanks for your updated info, kahjot!

Actually, I was hoping for a version which allowed one to opt out of the font change part, because I have already applied the schreiberstein solution to revert to Lucida Grande, and was reluctant to actually try YosemiteRevert, worrying that it might screw up the font fix I am already satisfied with.

Also, was wondering if there is an undo?

Nate

According to their release notes, version 1.2 "adds the ability to undo the changes that YosemiteRevert makes".

Right now it won't change the system font, because they are working out the bugs. I'm not sure what will happen to a system like yours when they get the font kinks worked out. Maybe contact the developer and ask if it will be an optional change?

It's unfortunate that you have to pay them $2 to try it out. Not a huge amount, but still…

Thanks for the addnl info.

As for cost, when I started using computers in the 80s, commercial programs were $200-300-500; no free trials; no returns; and all buggy, so to me today's software is a real bargain.

Regards, Nate