MacOS – Font smoothing for pdf files in OSX Yosemite Safari vs Skim

latexmacospdfskim

I produce a lot of pdf files using LaTeX and thus, I also read a lot of such files. After the update to OS X 10.10 the fonts are not smooth anymore. However, Safari seems to handle it much better than Skim (see screenshot for comparison).

The option "Use LCD font smoothing when available" is enabled; without it, the texts are almost unreadable. Anyone has any clue how to make the font looking better?

Screenshot 1 :

Screenshot 2 (left quick preview [spacebar], right Skim):

Hardware: I use non-retina MacBook Pro 2011 + Fujitsu 27" LCD attached with dual-head DVI.

Best Answer

This bug appears to be fixed in 10.10.3.

I can confirm (with Pixie) the rendering is the same in Preview, Skim, and QuickLook, at least with subpixel rendering forced to 2.

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Is it possible to spell check PDF files

I would install aspell with a package manager like brew and then run that on the .tex file. Unless I'm mistaken emacs has support for aspell built-in.

You can also turn on spell checking in your terminal (iterm2) or emacs GUI.

Besides Skim, what OSX PDF viewers support SyncTeX

If you don't mind using macports you can install okular:

port install okular

Consider editing the port file if you want to use kile (KDE's TeX editor) as well, as it depends on texlive and most mac users already have a TeXlive installation through MacTeX:

port edit kde4-kile
#remove the line which contains texlive
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After installing okular (and optionally kile) open okular and go to Settings > Configure Okular > Editor and insert the command to start your favorite editor( %f stands for the path, %l for the line). This question on tex.so describes the setup for kile.

Finally click on any part of the PDF while holding shift to use reverse sync.

Best Answer

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