Bad font rendering without anti-aliasing
It seems we are in a minority, but many people can't stand anti-aliased fonts. Unfortunately, non-antialiased font rendering is extremely ugly in poppler-based pdf viewers, on both viewers using the Cairo and Splash backend. I'm not sure if the issue is with poppler but hopefully someone can point this out.
Adobe reader does a much better job. The following examples are screenshots from acroread and qpdfview with Splash backend.
System font rendering on Mate (using Cairo?) makes beautiful sharp text, so why can't poppler make them? The following larger examples are from acroread, Pluma on Mate, pdftocairo and qpdfview with Splash backend.
See the source pdf: test.pdf