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Why are the fonts in Document Viewer so ugly and non-antialiased?

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could you perhaps give a link to a sample file? The fonts look fine in my pdfs. – adempewolff Aug 22 '12 at 7:20
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My guess is that you see this behavior only for some documents, right?

In that case I think that you see output from an old LaTeX version with standard LaTeX bitmap fonts. I have found the document that you are showing and the fonts are non-aliased also on my system -- although I know that regular documents look perfect. It's also non-aliased under Windows, so there.

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You're exactly right. The DVI-to-PDF conversion was done improperly. – izx Aug 22 '12 at 7:38
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Oh, so I can't help it seems. Well, we'll live through it - with a cold beer in hand the fonts doesn't really matter. – Primož Kralj Aug 22 '12 at 7:50
If you print it, it will look "normal". – izx Aug 23 '12 at 7:10
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There is no text in your pdf file, but a compressed jpeg image for each page.

So the font cannot scale. It is a fixed picture, not a scalable font.

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Nah, there is text alright: www-robotics.usc.edu/~stergios/icra99-3D-final.pdf. It's just that it doesn't use vector fonts. – January Aug 22 '12 at 7:36
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The main font is of poor Quality... it is a type 3 font. Type 3 Fonts are bitmap fonts -> same problem like with other "pictures" they are not scalable. – mondjunge Aug 22 '12 at 7:45
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@mondjunge: Type 3 fonts are not of poor quality. They are simply not optimized for low resolution devices like screens. – Martin Schröder Aug 23 '12 at 6:50
What Martin said. Your answer is incorrect in that there is no "compressed image for each page", JPEG or otherwise. – izx Aug 23 '12 at 7:11
You are correct, the first time I downloaded the pdf it was copy protected, so I could not highlight any chars, so I thought it was a jpeg... – mondjunge Aug 23 '12 at 13:11

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