Curved strokes pixelate when exported to PDF

Question

Hello. I've looked this up, and am certain an answer exists but haven't found anything.

Issue: Curved strokes drawn in Illustrator pixelate when converted to PDF and I need these to look smooth when viewing a document. Straight lines and text look fine. I'm not new to Illustrator but don't remember this being an issue with earlier versions. For reference, I've attached an example of what I'm talking about. It's a screenshot but this is the way the PDF looks.

Also for reference: 24-inch iMac (M-1, 2021). OS: Monterey 12.6.1. Illustrator version: 27.0. I've tried various export settings with no luck. Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Brad @ Roaring Mouse · Answer

This is normal and expected behaviour.

ALL vector objects are rasterized into pixels (in a grid) at some point, whether it be at the printer or for display on the screen, and how "jagged" curves look depend on the resolution of that output device. A typical monitor can be about 96ppi, whereas a printer is typically 600dpi. Assuming you haven't rasterized these objects before exporting (which will hard convert it to pixels based on your Document Raster settings), if you know they are still vector, the more you zoom in on these objects, the better they will look.

That being said, Acrobat has a preference where it applies anti-aliasing to vector objects that helps smooth them out. It's in Preferences > page display > Smooth Line Art. Maybe you turned it off recently where before you had it on? This is an end user setting; not something that can be set ina PDF, so how good it looks to others depends on how they are viewing it.

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