Q: Font in Preview blurry

https://discussions.apple.com/message/26878460#26878460

Someone who still has Yosemite installed should report this as a bug to Apple.

Happens when you drag the window with mouse.

Press command + 0 or command + shift + -/+

Dear Stuart Field and concerned Apple staff,

Apparently it is because the anti-aliasing algorithm used by Preview.app in Yosemite is incorrect.

The same problem has been raised and discussed recently on other sites including Reddit and StackExchange.

A comparison of the same PDF viewed in 10.9 and 10.10 can be seen below (images taken from this post).

10.9 (correct and beautiful with colorful shadow):

and on 10.10 (weird, grey shadow):

Presumably this bug is coming from the incorrect adjustment for Mac family with retina display.

Note that this bug does NOT happen in Safari, which is quite amusing.

Sincerely,

Leo

I'm having problems with Annotations in Preview 8 (Yosemite) rendering incorrectly as well, as I've detailed in this thread with screenshots:

Yosemite Preview is not the same as Mavericks Preview!

Bhavesh

I have the same problem. Apple's legendary pdf smoothing algorithm--that served me so well until Mavericks--is utterly flawed in Yosemite. I am literally squinting at text in pdf documents--it looks gray!

I have the same issue, however I did find that in full screen mode, selecting "continuous scrolling" under the view options dramatically improves the appearance. Or simply press ⌘1 when in Preview.

I think "continuous scrolling" is enabled by default and it does not help this issue. The only workaround I am aware of so far is to open PDFs using Safari.

Another option is to use Preview 7 from Mavericks....

Hi Leo, give it a chance in full screen by pressing ⌘1

I am certain you will be viewing your PDF in the original quality of the file.

Tried. No improvement.

Seems in OS X 10.10.1, Preview 8.0 (859), that the text is crisp and clear when opening, but gets blurred when for instance adjusting window height. When slightly altering the window width,  text looks sharp again. As if the text is initially rendered like it should, but then for performance reasons is translated to an image in memory. The translation occurs in a flawed way then.

I have the same issue, but made some interesting observation. If you open the PDF in single page view, and then scroll forward to get to next page, then the rendering is OK on the page that is being scrolled away.

This is by no means a solution! Rather, it is an indication that the blurry rendering is interpreted by Apple as being an improvement to what we consider to be the correct rendering. It seems like the correct rendering is 'cheaper' computationally than the newer blurry rendering. This is yet another argument to go back to the rendering of Mavericks!

I'm having the same issues, quite annoying frankly. I hope that apple is working on a fix.