Participant

Question

Unwanted bold fonts when converting AI to pdf

Forum|Forum|17 years ago
August 10, 2008
11 replies
42160 views

When converting fonts to outlines in Ai(cs3) and then saving it as a pdf (high quality print) the letter "l" appears to be bold in pdf file. Does this affect my printwork? or is a blitch in the pdf viewer or else?.
I've tried converting directly from illustrator and through distiller, both the same results.
Anybody?

G

greensusie51

Inspiring

We found the solution to this by complete accident.

It seems 'l's and some other rectangular sans serif letters are not recognised properly on saving to pdf if you have outlined the font in illustrator.

The soloution is to open the illstrator file with outlined fonts, and add extra anchor points to your vertical lines on the 'l' letter (between the corner points) this makes no difference of course to the shape, but once saved and converted to pdf, or imported into indesign then saved to pdf, the width of the letter 'l' seems to be recognised correctly.

Hope this helps

Its a glitch I think...

fransiss77513671

Participant

This is the only thing that worked for me. Thank you!

G

greensusie51

Inspiring

glad to help!

S

Stefan-mpd

Participant

Dear Ton,

Thank you for your quick reply.

The reason I convert the text to curves is simply because when I print the document that is provided, in certain places and pages the fonts appear weird, they change to symbols or something for some reason. Probably because they aren't embedded into the document by the client.

What's the solution in that case?

Looking forwards to your best advice.

Thanks.

G

GabrielHAZE

Participant

The following works but it's a headache:

It seems that "san serif" fonts are the biggest culprit of this issue. Rather than exporting typography from Illustrator it's best if you use InDesign for all font usage. Meaning I usually design tag lines for logos in Illustrator than turning the text into outlines. This works if you aren't putting the file through InDesign. The easiest way I found to solve this issue is to pen tool out the area where the text on the illustrator image is, then duplicate the text in indesign using a text box.

A

Anonymous

"Thickening" of square/rectangular shapes in PDFs (this is seen only in Acrobat, not in Apple's Preview) is discussed here:

http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/004301.html

with a solution (by "fixing" the shapes in Illustrator).

S

Stan-d-mon

Participant

Ok, I understand that the bold L will print correctly, but is there any way to stop it from happening on the preview?

We want to use the PDF online and don't want the L's stealing the show.

Thanks

J

JayJhabrix

Inspiring

It's a common problem with viewing pdfs. No solution ASFAIK apart from converting the type to Outline. But that then increases file size.

JJ

S

Stefan-mpd

Participant

Dear JJ,

I used an adobe preflight fix up (Covert text to outlines) on the client provided pdf document (Brochure). It created all the text to outlines for sure but on the other hand when it finished the fixup, it made the 'l's in the text bolder/thicker. One of the similar problems Ernst was facing.

I tried printing it on my high resolution printed Richo C571 and to my disappointment it did show up on the print as well! How do we solve that problem? Any ideas?

Thanks.

_

_Ernst_Dambrink_Author

Participant

Thanks for your help Scott!!!!

grtz

Ersnt

Steve Fairbairn

Inspiring

Scott's got it absolutely right. Check your pdfs in maximum zoom and you will see that the outlined type is perfect to all intents and purposes. Embedding fonts SHOULD work these days but accidents have happened, so if you are using unusual or home-made fonts, outlining them will make your pdfs foolproof and there is no chance of them reverting to Courier (which sometimes happened in the old days). I usually outline fonts before making pdfs, at least on smalller print jobs that don't contain much text. Saves you having to worry about things going wrong at the printers. The down side is that if you have made a typo the printer won't be able to correct it, so you need to be very thorough in your proofreading.

A

Anonymous

This all made perfect sense to me until you said the solution was to outline the text. I also use myriad pro for the text in diagrams I prepare in Illustrator and save as .ai files. Once finalised, I select all the text (usually on a separate layer) and outline it (Type->Create Outlines), then save the resulting file as a .eps file.

In Illustrator, it looks perfect. After inserting the diagram into my document in InDesign CS3 (Object->Anchored Object->Insert, followed by File->Place) the diagrams are all pixellated, which I'm not greatly surprised by, but when I export the whole document as a PDF and check it out in Adobe Reader, the lower-case ells and upper-case i's are both thicker and taller than the rest of the text.

Printed out it looks fine, but like others, I want to make my documents available online.

Scott Falkner

Community Expert

It is suitable for printing. The lack of hinting will generally thicken your text by one device dot. Your monitor's device dot is one pixel. Widening a two pixel wide letter by one pixel is noticeable. But the same file printed on a high resolution press might mean the difference between a 100 dot wide letter and a 101 dot wide letter. On a 2400 DPI plate, that makes the letter 1/2400 of an inch wider.

_

_Ernst_Dambrink_Author

Participant

Hello Scott,
Thanks for your remarks....does this mean that the PDF I made is suitable for printing......will the bold "l" not show up in my folder??? (probably a stupid questuion , but I'm a complete newby concerning Ai and PDF formats)

Ernst

Scott Falkner

Community Expert

This is normal because most fonts are hinted. Hinting adjusts those paths for optimal display or printout. The higher the resolution or size of type, the closer the grid and the type's paths conform to one another, so the less obvious the hinting is. At large type sizes (like when you zoom in) or high resolution (like your printer) the less effective hinting is. This hinting is only done on type, so converting to paths removed the hinting.

_

_Ernst_Dambrink_Author

Participant

Hello Jacob

Thanks for responding
It looks fine when I print it on my inktjet
The font is myriad pro regular
The difference between the fonts dissapears on screen when I enlarge the pdf to about 800%.
you can have a look at a screenshot here http://www.11q.eu/vb.jpg

Ernst

Show more replies

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded