Small text is unreadable in my PDF document

When you view a PDF file in Skim, small text may look fuzzy or illegible. You can change a few options to make the text more legible.

To make small text more readable:

  1. Choose Skim > Preferences, and click Display.
  2. Deselect the "Anti-alias text" checkbox.
  3. Enter a smaller number in the "Greeking threshold" field.

Text in a point size smaller than the greeking threshold appears as a gray blur. The blurred text fits the outline of what the text would actually look like, but is illegible. Displaying blurred text takes less time because Skim doesn’t need to render each character individually.

If you turn off the "Anti-alias text and line art" option, large characters may appear jagged instead of smooth. Smoothing out the characters takes more time.

See also