Windows uses a technique called Clear Type where you tune Windows to take advantage of the position of the red green and blue pixels so as to make text edges as sharp as possible. Although this reduces the jagged appearance of the lines, it also makes them fuzzier.Īnother method for reducing jaggies is called smoothing, in which the printer changes the size and horizontal alignment of dotsto make curves smoother.Ī workaround might be to zoom in or out which will change the relative spacings. Antialiasing reduces the prominence of jaggies by surrounding the stairsteps with intermediate shades of gray (for gray-scaling devices) or color (for color devices).

Jaggies occur because the output device, the monitor or printer, doesn't have a high enough resolution to represent a smooth line. In computer graphics, antialiasing is a software technique for diminishing jaggies - stairstep-like lines that should be smooth. One of the comments on Bug 36448 states that it would be difficult to solve the issue by using the most recent text rendering API on OS X, because that would compromise OS X 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 support. What I know is that there are many layout and rendering bugs (characters appearing strange, columns not showing until the cursor has been moved, badly-named fonts etc) I believe there are a number of Mac-specific issues that have not been adressed for some time and I don't know to what extent the developers are aware of them. I now know that the source of the problem is that LibreOffice and OpenOffice use the old text layout engine ATSUI instead of Core Text, but there is no real solution yet… I found a post on a similar topic regarding LibreOffice:Ĭan anyone confirm that they have seen the same issue (either retina or non-retina)? Also, does anyone have any workarounds? Because the text is normally so sharp, I feel compelled to fix it anytime it gets blurry. Now, with the retina MacBook Pro, it is very visible and annoying. I think that the problem occurred using my old low-resolution MacBook Pro. See the attached screenshot - the text in the middle (where I have typed and selected text) is blurry, while the top & bottom are still sharp. Scrolling back and forth fixes the problem, presumably because it is then redrawing the text 'from scratch' instead of incrementally. If you are typing long blocks of text, and especially after selecting blocks of text, the text above and below the region can become blurry. There seems to be a problem with font rendering on the Mac using OpenOffice 4.1.0.

Cleartype mac