Skip to main content
Participant
September 21, 2023
Question

Export PDF that does not activate "Enhance thin lines" when opened in Acrobat

  • September 21, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 1558 views

Hi, 

The quality of an image created in Illustrator is great when saved as a PDF. When such an PDF is opened in Adobe Acrobat, however, thin lines are shown as thick (see attachment 1, while it is supposed to look like attachment 2). This is due to a pre-set feature of Acrobat called "Enhance thin lines". One can turn it off in Acrobat (and then the lines will be shown as originally drawn in illustrator), but most people don't know about this feature, resulting in a situation where whomever opens your PDF has a drastically different visual experience than what was intended (and drawn in illustrator). 

Since exporting or printing PDFs from illustrator will trigger the "Enhance thin lines" in Acrobat a workaround is needed. Exporting the image as a PNG results in decent quality and thin lines (see attachment 2), but still a significant loss of quality when viewed in Acrobat (see difference in attachments 3 and 4). 

I have tried the following solutions without success: 

1. Export / print PDF from illustrator 

2. Export PNG from illustrator --> converting to PDF through AI and PS 

3. Opening AI-file in PS and saving as PDF 

Does anybody have any ideas? It would be a godsend. 

Sincerely, 

Bendik


PS. 

Ideally Adobe should make it a choice to restrict ones PDF from triggering "Enhance thin lines" in Acrobat when exported through Illustrator. Alternatively, they could just change the default in Acrobat (I bet people would generally want to see images the way they where intended).  


2 replies

Ton Frederiks
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 21, 2023

Yes it would be an Acrobat request, but here is a movie by Mordy Golding where he suggests to add another anchor point to rectangles to avoid this anti-aliasing effect:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqr2gcVg0i4

Doug A Roberts
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 21, 2023

This is exclusively a setting in Acrobat. Illustrator cannot influence whether a user has it on or off.

There are some settings which can be controlled by Acrobat startup scripts, but as far as I know Enhance Thin Lines is not one of them.