How can I improve Mathematica's resolution on a macbook retina display?

Question

Mathematica looks a bit fuzzy on the retina screen, how can I increase the resolution?

Here another screenshot showing a direct comparison between the browser and Mathematica

Answer 1

Another option is the free app Retinizer, which I used for a while with Mathematica 8. It cleaned up the text, but I found caused visual glitches with the documentation and added some instability throughout. That said, it made the text look beautiful which helped the eyes when reading a lot of code.

You can turn it on and off, and it works on other applications. Worth a try, with the pros and cons in mind.

Answer 2

You can use one of the resolution setting utilities like switchResX to change the mode to 2880x1800. Then set the magnification in Mathematica to 200%. It works, but the menu bar is very small. Probably more trouble than it is worth.

Answer 3

This answer is complementary to Ian's. Retinizer appears to work very well with Mathematica 9. It increases even the resolution of Graphics, but not Graphics3D.

To get a prettier view of a Graphics3D, one can use the following function:

retinize[g_, n_: 2] := 
   Image[Rasterize[g, "Image", ImageResolution -> n 72], Magnification -> 1/n]

Here's an example from the docs, processed like this:

Answer 4

Here's how to do it for more recent versions of Mathematica (specifically, 9.0.1):

1. Get Retinizer, mentioned in other posts
2. Show Package Contents of Mathematica, navigate to ../Mathematica/Contents/ and open Info.plist for editing.
3. Delete the lines for NSHighResolutionCapable:True.
4. Save the plist.
5. Open Retinizer and drop Mathematica onto it as instructed. It should succeed instead of throwing an error.

Answer 5

The situation as far as I can guess (that's the operative word) is this: In order to supports Retina's high dpi, one has to compile the application using the Cocoa framework which has for long been the default application framework on Mac OS X anyway. Unfortunately, I don't think Mathematica does that. It uses the legacy Carbon framework. So in order to support Retina, they will probably have to rewrite a whole lot of front-end code.

By the way, this isn't just a display issue. The resolution of screen shots from Mathematica is also wrong. So if I paste a screen shot into Preview (a high-dpi application) and save it there, the result looks especially blurry when you embed it in a web page (or upload to StackExchange, for that matter). So I now try to avoid taking screen shots and instead use Export to PNG inside Mathematica. I also have a script that repairs the resolution for pasting into my Xemacs editor that I use to write web pages, but that's probably too specialized for this answer.