Participating Frequently

Question

InDesign CS3 -> PDF = fuzzy font, and random bold

Forum|Forum|17 years ago
February 27, 2008
41 replies
28047 views

Hello,

When I print straight from InDesign CS3, Garamond font looks fine. When I export to PDF, then print from Acrobat Professional 8, version 8.1.2, the Garamond font is not as crisp-looking. Also, when I print the PDF from Acrobat, there are a 2 or 3 lines of Garamond text (seemingly randomly dispersed among the rest of the text, although they're the same lines every time) that actually look like they're bold, even though they're not, in the original.

The fonts seem to be embedded. I am printing to a Ricoh Aficio MP C2500 PCL6 printer in both cases. I am running Windows XP Professional (Version 5.1) Service Pack 2.

This happens when I print in color. When I print in black and white, everything looks pretty crisp from Adobe Acrobat Professional.

Thanks so much for your help.

This topic has been closed for replies.

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osu4lolli

Participant

We found this week that our culprit for this issue was that in some of the text we had used "register" instead of "black" in the color pallet. They both look the same, right? Not so. Some printers don't know how to print the "register" so they print in CMY instead of K. If you print in BW only it looks fine. Double check text to make sure it is black and it should work.

We had success with other printers/printing in different formats as suggested above, but it never solved the root issue. Try the text color above and you should be good to go.

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Anonymous

Try to see in your indesign document on the wired page, have you ever link any big PSD picture file?

Because I have the same issue with you.

And checking a long time, finally I found on the problem page, I have two big PSD picture linked, and when I export PDF from indesign,

that two page of text will look bold in PDF even it looks good in indesign.

Hope it will help you.

P

Phil_Diggle

Participant

I understand this thread is well over a year old now, but I have had this problem for ages and ages!!

Suddenly had a brain wave, and amazingly enough, it worked.

I have a Ricoh MPC 2500 which prints black text fuzzy on a full colour run. Has always done this from PDF's but never from a Word document - which leads me to think it's a Postscript fault in the driver.

Whilst I personally don't use InDesign for my work, a colleague of mine does. I use CorelDRAW and he uses InDesign, and when exporting the same document through both programs to PDF the fuzzy black print appears. We have changed numerous settings, talked to engineers and colleagues at different companies. One suggestion was to export as PDF X/1a which caters for Colour Blind issues. This did not solve the problem.

Upon inspection with magnifying glass it was clear to see that the dots around the text were indeed made of the C,M and Y colours. So, I decided to confuse the printer and set my black from 0,0,0,100 to 100,100,100,100. Low and behold, export to PDF and print - the text printed crystal clear. Have tried this for both CorelDRAW and InDesign - and the problem rectified.

Not quite sure what would cause this - but a little bit of confusion goes a long way!!

Thanks,

Phil

Peter Spier

Community Expert

If you are getting 4-color black text, it's near certain that you are introducing a color profile conversion during the export process. Either leave colors unchanged (which should work fine for a laser printer), use the correct profile as the working space, or use convert to profile (preserve numbers) and the problem should disappear. Printing in 400% Toner isgoing to make for very fragile text that may flake off if it doesn't fuse properly.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

Looking back through this thread, ligatures were identified as a problem several posts back, but I believe only in relation to the specific printing scenario, i.e. on the Ricoh.

Peter

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_Dominic_Hurley_

Participating Frequently

>The random bolding problem is caused due to Acrobat not handling
ligatures correctly.

I've not heard of any such problem and I've never had any issue with ligatures myself. It should not be necessary to turn off ligatures to obtain correct PDFs. Just ensure that fonts are set to "download complete" or "download subset" and that "download PPD fonts" is checked.

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_Charles_T__Mills_

Participant

The random bolding problem is caused due to Acrobat not handling
ligatures correctly. Ligatures are special characters created
automatically for letters like "f" in relationship with other letters.
The problem must be fixed in InDesign by turning off "Ligatures." To
do this select all the text in a text box, select the "Character" tab,
and then select the character options menu in the upper right hand
corner of the dialog box (small triangle and three lines). In this
menu uncheck the check mark next to "Ligatures."

You must repeat these steps for all text boxes. Save the file and then
re-export a new PDF. This will fix the problem. Of course you can't
use ligature characters...but that will be something Adobve will need
to fix in Reader.

Dov Isaacs

Legend

Adobe knows of no such problem in Acrobat that you describe as Acrobat not handling ligatures correctly. Where did you get such misinformation?

Acrobat and Reader render whatever characters are in the PDF file with either the font embedded in the PDF file by the software generating the PDF file or if the font is not embedded, using a host version of such a font if the user's system has that same font (i.e. the same name). Lacking either an embedded version of the font or the font being installed on the system of the user with Acrobat or Reader accessing the PDF file, an Acrobat substitution font is used.

Problems with display of ligature characters can only occur as follows:

(1) Exporting PDF from InDesign, the designated font was protected and thus was not embedded. (You would have received a warning from InDesign when doing such an export operation!) In this case, when the resultant document is opened by Acrobat or Reader, an attempt is made to find the umembedded font on the user's system. If not found, a substitution font is used by Acrobat or Reader. If the substitution font does not contain the desire ligatures, you could get either square box (.notdef), a bullet, or a space character in place of the desired ligature. The same problem would occur if you used an exotic symbol or ornament character in a font. Note that the symptoms occur in the case of the unembedded font if Acrobat or Reader uses a font with the same name that differs in character set from the font composed with in InDesign; thus if you compose with a Helvetica, Times, Garamond, Arial, Palatino, etc. font and due to lack of font embedding, you display with a different version, character set mismatches will cause same symptoms to occur.

(2) Producing a PDF via distillation of PostScript, you specified "no embedding" or the font could not be found by the Distiller. The same symptoms will occur as in (1) above.

Otherwise, we are not aware of any situation (i.e., a bug associated with improper embedding or display) in either InDesign or Acrobat that would cause ligatures to not work for display in Acrobat. We are aware of some printers/RIPs that do not use Adobe-licensed PDF or PostScript that override either PDF-embedded or PostScript-embedded fonts with "printer resident" versions of same with matching names, but different character sets and metrics, that would cause these symptoms when printing.

- Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)

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_Som_Thing_

Participant

I have had this same problem. Certain sections of type print heavier or apper bolded when they are not actually bold type.

For Acrobat I just fixed the problem. Printing on the same printer (HP9500 Colour LaserJet) from the Mac is OK. From the PC random bolded type. From another PC to a different printer was fine. So it is the printer DRIVER. SO I went to the HP web site and looked for an updated driver. What I found was two kinds of drivers. PCL and PS (post script). I was using the PCL5 driver. I downloaded the post script driver and installed it as a new printer. Problem solved. All the type prints nice and crisp and clean. Much better than the PCL5 driver made it, even when it wasn't randomly bolding type.

Makes sense since everything is post script, a PS driver would work best.

On a side note: Illustrator - Set the printing/export output to vector maximum, not raster. This keeps illustrator from combining areas into images and miing vecotr and rastered objects. Most annoying

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_lucy_owens_

Participant

I solved the problem (at least with printing on our copier)
I noticed the only 'fuzzy' lines had 'f' words in them...
like flesh, fulfill, field... etc.
When I capitalized the f words, there was no fuzzy text.

I called adobe a couple of times and the last time I called after discovering that it was only the "f" words... he said 'that sounds like ligatures'

So under the character tab, ligature is checked by default...
i unchecked it, and so far (knock on wood) everything is printing just fine.

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_lucy_owens_

Participant

Another weird thing... On this one brochure I've been trying to get PERFECT... when I deleted 2 of the words in each of the lines of fuzzy text, it printed ok.

We shouldn't have to go thru and delete random words just to make our documents print ok!!

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_lucy_owens_

Participant

We've been going crazy with this same thing... sometimes it prints random fuzzy text directly from InDesign. Sometimes when I save it as a pdf first, there are fuzzy lines, plus it seems to lose overall quality.

I was thinking it was a problem with indesign and the copier not working together right. We have a Canon Imagerunner 5885

I have spent MANY MANY hours trying to fix this.
between indesign, pdf settings and the copier settings there are literally 100's of variations of settings to try.

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