Strange LaTeX PDF rendering in Firefox – letter "t" is bold

Question

I have this problem with Firefox 50.0 on Fedora 23 and GNOME 3.18.2. When I view a PDF document created in LaTeX, the letter "t" shows bold with default zoom:

Screenshot with default zoom:

When I zoom in, everything looks fine. Screenshot with 140% zoom:

Link to the document:
http://web.stanford.edu/~fringer/teaching/numerical_methods_02/handouts/lecture4.pdf

Has anyone encountered a similar issue?

Answer 1

Yes, I encounter similar issues frequency. The PDF document is made for printing, that means for a decent DPI resolution. At lower resolutions (like what you get on the screen), font rendering isn't perfect, so characters may appear too thick, too thin, or slightly off position. Rendering fonts with aliasing, or improving the aliasing algorithm may fix this issue, but it looks like nobody has done that.

For me, it's not a really problem: It prints fine, and when I look at it on screen, I only care for the contents.