[OS X TeX] TeX on Yosemite

[Richard Seguin]

> On Oct 18, 2014, at 11:31 PM, Richard Seguin <riseguin at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Oct 18, 2014, at 2:35 PM, Richard Seguin <riseguin at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Oct 18, 2014, at 12:18 PM, Richard Koch <koch at math.uoregon.edu> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Richard,
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Oct 18, 2014, at 9:26 AM, Richard Seguin <riseguin at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>>> When typesetting math, a full page view of the PDF is very useful, but if the font smoothing is poor, the tiny letters and symbols become more difficult to read. I just rechecked, and it does seem that TeXShop is doing an adequate job of text smoothing, but Skim is currently sub-adequate on non-retina displays.
>>> 
>>> I believe both TeXShop and Skim have their own preference setting called
>>> “Smooth Text and Line Art”. I recommend checking to see if this on in both,
>>> on in just one, or off in both. By probability theory incorrectly applied,
>>> the middle and desirable choice is most likely.
>>> 
>>> Dick Koch
>> 
>> 
>> Dick,
>> 
>> Font smoothing is turned on in both TeXShop and Skim. That option is clearly functioning in Skim because if you turn it off, it gets much worse. The problem is, it’s not quite good enough in Skim. And it doesn’t, and shouldn’t, matter if one is turned off and the other one turned on.
>> 
>> Richard
> 
> I’ve studied this a little more tonight, and it does appear that font smoothing in Skim is qualitatively different (and significantly worse) than that of TeXShop while executing within Yosemite. One or both applications must be using a font smoothing scheme different than system default. I’ve tried playing with system default values via the terminal,
> 
> http://osxdaily.com/2010/02/18/change-font-smoothing-settings/
> 
> but can’t improve Skim’s font rendering with this. I’ve also played with varying magnification % in Skim, but that seems to have negligible effect.
> 
> Richard Séguin

I’ve discovered that there were two bug complaint “tickets” submitted to the developer(s) about poor font rendering in Skim under Yosemite, both of which were summarily dismissed by Christiaan Hofman with the explanation that the problem is caused by Apple’s PDFKit and there is nothing they can do about it. Hofman immediately closed the tickets. See Tickets #1008 and #1007 on the right side of this page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/skim-app/

However, it’s clear that both TeXShop and Preview, which I’m sure also use PDFKit, are not having this problem. Hofman clearly did not investigate the complaint very thoroughly. 

Does anyone want to try reopening this complaint? I once tried to complain about something to these people and also got summary treatment, and personally I don’t want to go there again. Filing a bug/ticket report requires jumping through a few hoops. I’m already spending too much time on this.

Richard Séguin