[Tex/LaTex] .pdf font rendering

fontsrendering

My friend and I are working on the same subject and I asked her to see her work. I noticed that her pdf rendering (if it's really that) is a lot different than mine even though we use the same "template". We both use TexMaker with MikTeX, hers is on Mac, mine is on Windows.

Left is mine, right is hers.

enter image description here

If anyone knows what cause the difference here and could help me getting the same thing that would be great.

Thank you.

Best Answer

MiKTeX doesn't run on Mac OS X, so probably your friend has installed MacTeX, which by default includes the CMSuper font package which provides Type1 renderings of the European Modern fonts that are used in documents that have

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

that's recommended when writing in French or another European language.

The fact is that the basic installation of MiKTeX doesn't include this font package (see Why are Bitmap-Fonts used automatically?). Install it with MiKTeX's package manager, otherwise the machine running MiKTeX will display bitmap fonts created at 600dpi, which is the most probable cause of the difference you see.

You can avoid this installation by adding to your document

\usepackage{lmodern}

that makes LaTeX use a different set of fonts that, however, are almost indistinguishable from the Computer/European Modern fonts. See Latin Modern vs cm-super? for more information.

Just to show what happens

Image with CMSuper fonts disabled

enter image description here

Image with CMSuper fonts enabled

enter image description here

Image with the Latin Modern fonts (\usepackage{lmodern})

enter image description here

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