High Sierra 10.13.1 Blurry Preview in Preview

I've been looking at a few different PDFs in Preview and Chrome. Some look identical…

So at this point I'm thinking it may have to do with what fonts are being used and which PDF standard. The above is PDF 1.4.

Hello,

I am exactly having the same problem since I updated to High Sierra a month ago. I am no longer able to read papers. Chrome renders OK. Did not try with Firefox. Will try and report in safe mode. I am on an old MBP which is non-retina.

For me, the issue is not at all "slight" difference, it's absolutely horrible.

I am attaching a comparison between Preview and Mendeley Desktop.

huseyingungor wrote:

I would like to report a detail that might be relevant to solving this.

I have just rebooted my Mac in safe mode and Preview seems to be working well, that is, no blurry rendering (If you want, I can provide screenshots). Shouldn't this suggest that there is some app which is causing this behaviour?

Yes, that is exactly what it suggests. It also would explain why I can't see the difference you are seeing.

huseyingungor wrote:

I would like to report a detail that might be relevant to solving this.

I have just rebooted my Mac in safe mode and Preview seems to be working well, that is, no blurry rendering (If you want, I can provide screenshots). Shouldn't this suggest that there is some app which is causing this behaviour?

Yes, it does.

You may also try Preview in a different user account, and see if it behaves like the Safe mode version or the blurry one.

You may also post an Etrecheck report so we can take a look, and hopefully detect some possible causes.

Last time. Some look identical, some don't. As I mentioned with the example you showed Preview renders the characters with a different "weight", i.e. more "bold-like". Chrome uses Adobe's PDF plug-in, Preview doesn't. As far as I know, Apple still only fully supports PDF 1.3. The latest standard is PDF 1.7.

I, and now OT suggested you try Adobe Reader or as OT mentioned, Skim.

Personally I don't see that much difference in the two samples you provided except that the text appears a bit larger in the Preview sample. You're comparing a browser to a pdf reader and that may be the difference in appearance.

There is a "slight" detail that has not been mentioned here and that also may be making a big difference.

If I understood correctly, you have a MacBook Air... which means no "Retina" screen. How a pdf is rendered by Preview on a retina vs non-retina may help explain some of the different experiences.

If you have a chance to compare how some pdf looks on your screen vs a friend rMBP, for example, it may be illuminating. Or if you like you can post some problematic pdf (to dropbox or similar), and I will test it on my rMBP and nonretina iMac, and will show you captures of both for comparison.

Using your PDF.

So here on my MacPro I have 4 versions of Mac OS X/ macOS.

The oldest Lion 10.7.5 renders your pdf perfectly well.

Next is El Capitan 10.11.6 which is blurred.

Next is Sierra 10.12.6 which is perfect.

High Sierra 10.13.1 is blurred.

A new clean install of High Sierra 10.13.1 no third party apps, extensions etc, Preview blurred.

If you Google Preview blurred in Yosemite, or El Capitan, Sierra and High Sierra you will see that it is a constant problem with various OS's over the years. I believe Mavericks was fine, Yosemite was never resolved, I was surprised to boot into El Capitan and find that the pdfs were blurred. Sierra was fixed so we can only hope that they will pay some attention to the issue in High Sierra, in the meantime don't hold you breath.

The only reason that I can give for a perceived increase in focus whilst in safe mode is that the display profile being used in safe mode has increased contrast and therefore gives the impression of the text being sharper.

In High Sierra when you zoom in to the document it renders fine but it is when you zoom out approx 125% and less that it gets blurry, in Sierra for example the document is rendered well in all zoomed windows.