Question

I need help exporting to PDF: Straight lines become wavy.

Forum|Forum|5 months ago
December 10, 2025
2 commentaire
370 vue

Hello everyone,
I have encountered a problem several times when exporting PDFs in InDesign. Images with straight but slanted lines suddenly become wavy during export. I have tried various export settings, and this happens with both print PDFs and interactive PDFs. This does not happen when exporting to JPG or PNG if I activate the ‘Smooth edges’ field. Is there a similar setting for PDFs? Or does anyone know of another solution? I am at a loss!

This is a section of the original image.

This is what InDesign does when exporting...

Until now, I had always exported the pages as jpg files and reassembled them in Acrobat Reader, but of course this means that many functions get lost. I'm really struggling here, so thank you in advance for your help!

Kind regards, Paula 🙂

Import and export

Randy Hagan

Community Expert

Please let me ask a dirty question:

Dirty Question: When you print out the placed image in question, does it print cleanly, or does it print with the same jagged lines as shown in your screen captures?

If your PDF prints as poorly as it looks in your screen capture, I'd double-check the Links panel to ensure that your placed graphic is still linked to the InDesign document. Exporting to PNG or JPG effectively renders an InDesign document page to whatever specifications you set from InDesign. Creating a PDF embeds a copy of a graphic placed within InDesign as it generates a PDF replica of your document. If the placed file isn't linked, you would only get the screen representation of that graphic, at a default of 72dpi, embedded in the resulting PDF.

Hope this helps,

Randy

P

paula_3433Auteur

Hi Randy,

I need to revise my statements: It seems that there is no problem with the print PDF after all. In that case, it is a digital display error that disappears when zooming and printing.
The image from my first post is from an interactive PDF export. The images are linked as normal. The wavy lines can be seen there on every slanted line on every page and it looks terrible in the online presentation.

Do you have any other ideas for solving the problem?

Paula

Randy Hagan

Community Expert

Maybe.

If you haven't already, I'd try export compression options to JPEG 2000 (Lossless), Maximum JPEG Quality and 300 dpi. Or, if we're creating presentation slides and using no animation, maybe try to save your PDFs first from Photoshop. If you don't rasterize the type layers, they'll come out as sharp as vector type can reproduce and lock in your image resolution at 300 dpi.

Other than that, I don't know of anything off the top of my head that could help.

Hope this works for you,

Randy

Anubhav M

Community Manager

Hello @paula_3433,

Thanks for reaching out. Could you try changing the Compression settings for color images when exporting the PDF to not downsample to see if it helps?

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Anubhav

P

paula_3433Auteur

Hello Anubhav,

thank you for your answer.

I have already tried many export settings. The image I posted was exported without any compression (JPEG 2000 lossless).

Best regards

Paula

Bill Silbert

Community Expert

Have you tried using the progarm included settings for the print pdfs of High Quality or Press Quality? Have you tried upping the quality to Maximum and the resolution to 300 ppi for the Interactive pdfs?

Screenshot 2025-12-11 at 5.31.39 AM.png

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