Blurry rendering in Preview on OS X 10.11

Exactly the same problem here. Acrobat works perfect though.

Hi,

in Preview app go to Preview menù --> settings --> Pdf tab and unselect "smooth text and line art" option. This works great for me!

yes, it makes it a bit better, but still not as sharp as in Acrobat

nice one! why on earth Apple doesn't disable this option by default on non-retina Macs is beyond me... Oh wait, they want you to buy a new Mac... duh....

This was checked for me by default and I'm still having the issue. When I open the document it's usually fine, but if I resize it, it's often blurry, so I have to play with sizing until it's legible.

Same issue for me. Interestingly, a pdf's preview pane in the finder is often sharper than the pdf opened in Preview.

Hoping that Apple addresses this in the first update.

Hello,

i'm on 10.11 with a MBP13(2009), but connect it to several external TFT displays, resolution always at a minimum of HD at least, so doubt its linked to retina?!?

I always was a huge fan of previews font rendering.

Working also on PCs and LINUX, i found papers nowhere looked as good as displayed with preview.

This holds true until 10.10.5, but now i face serious issues.

Switching off smoothing makes the fonts crisp and readable, but now it looks ugly, and resizing makes it worse then (natural, since smoothing is off).

Very much reminds me of the Clear Type issue Microsoft had when they introduced it in Windows XP. Took until Windows 7 to really work in the end.

But Preview always had been perfect here...

Had to switch to Acrobat often because of preview's unusable markup-color, but for reading, preview still was great...

It seems to get worse and worse with preview, sorry, must say so. Do the developers hate this application ;-)

It was so great in 10.8, get back there! We need it!

Best

While Smooth text and line art turned off, keep zooming in with two fingers and you will ended with a black screen hang. (MBP 2010-mid, El Capitan)

Exactly my problem too! On my 4K monitor, fonts look blurry, but when initiating page turns, they transiently sharpen.

Apple, please cut the crap and get your act together. This issue (or some variant thereof) surfaced in Mavericks. It was subsequently remedied in Yosemite, only to rear its ugly head yet again in El Capitan.

I am having this issue too. Sometimes when I double click on a word, the font will sharpen. But from my memory, it used to be a lot better. I started noticing this "soft" (versus sharp) font issue after El Capitan. To my eye Adobe Acrobat does use better, so I will probably switch back to Acrobat for the first time in like 10 years. Disabling the "Smooth text and line art" helps a little (it make sit look more like Acrobat) but this option is supposed to make things look BETTER not worse. Of note, I have a non-retina MacBook Air.

slw287r wrote:

While Smooth text and line art turned off, keep zooming in with two fingers and you will ended with a black screen hang. (MBP 2010-mid, El Capitan)

The same with my mid-2010 iMac, both with 10.11.0 and 10.11.1, although with one difference: the Preview window doesn't get black, but white. And if you continue zooming, then you get a system hang.

BTW, I'm also experiencing a blurry Preview display like the OP said, and the "smooth text and line art" doesn't change it, you see the PDF blurry no matter if you enable or disable that setting.

This is quite disappointing: 10.11 was supposed to be a "safe update", just fixing a lot of issues and making you system snappier. But fact is that Preview is still broken by 10.11.1, and it wasn't broken before updating to 10.11.

I see the same problem. All the PDF files are blurry.

Also noticed that safari is blurry in splitview mode. I have linkedin open in safari in splitview and suddenly the whole website, drop down menus are blurry.

I have exactly the same problem in El Capitan. As I do a lot of work every day in Preview, I am really screwed... :-(

This problem exists since the VERY first version. I've been reporting this issue though the experience feedback for months and still nothing.