Ability to control whether a PDF export will trigger the "Enhance thin lines" preference in Adobe Acrobat for the viewer
Requesting that it be made a feature of InDesign, Illustrator, and other vector graphics Adobe program to add an export setting for PDFs that control whether they will be displayed with “Enhance thin lines” in Adobe Acrobat.
I use InDesign and Illustrator to export PDF’s, including booklets, pamphlets, and fliers frequently. These often go through a rigorous review cycle with managers, communications professionals, scientists, engineers, and others, as I work for a government agency that shares scientific information through visual graphics and written language regularly. It is frustrating to constantly send a PDF, only for the viewer to ask me to change and re-export my document because it “looks off” or is “inaccurate” when the design is carefully constructed and accurate within the Adobe vector graphics program, but rendered inaccurately in Acrobat, which is the standard PDF viewer for the agency. For a while, I could not understand why this was. I tried playing with various export settings to optimize my document. I eventually turned to rasterizing my graphics, ultimately sacrificing precious time and for every edit I was asked to make, not to mention scalability, so that my vector artwork could be viewed correctly.
Eventually, I realized the culprit of this frustrating, time consuming, crime: “Enhance thin lines,” a preference in Acrobat that adds inconsistent and awkward line thickness and glitch-iness to the viewer. No matter what I do in my Adobe preferences, I now must reconcile with the fact that everyone who looks at my artwork in a PDF format will see it incorrectly. Now I could ask them to follow a tutorial to turn off the preference, but most users I work with would have no idea how to do this without instruction, and even still will rarely actually time to follow it just to review a draft. I think it goes without saying that PDF’s are often required, because folks need to be able to copy paste text and easily zoom for digital media, and it is also the most standard file for print production.
I have done some research and there are plenty of threads requesting a feature to override the “Enhance thin lines” preference, or default to its being off, by paying Adobe customers from as far back as 2009 (and possibly even before that). Responses from Adobe typically value those who apparently need the feature, cited Microsoft users, rather than designers and artists who pay for the full Adobe suite, who’s daily work is being affected by these Adobe products being, frankly, incompatible. If I export something from one Adobe program, and open it in another, should I not expect it to look how I designed it? Even still, I recognize Microsoft users are an important customers base. This is why I am requesting that Adobe Suite users be able to turn the preference off through an export setting that would temporarily disable the preference for the viewers of that particular artwork, so that all of our designs may be viewed as intended, and we do not need to keep having the same conversation with customers, over and over again.
I cannot post pictures, as there are sensitivities with sharing my work, but there are plenty of examples out there already, both on Adobe forums and Reddit. To cite some particularly glitchy elements:
- QR codes
- Outlined text (used for logos, typographic artwork, or sometimes print production)
- Vector illustrations with line art
- Lines or shapes created as section dividers for text or graphics
- Logos
- Data Visualization including tables, spreadsheets, & graphs
In summary, almost everything I create in the Adobe Creative Suite is negatively affected by the “Enhance thin lines” Adobe Acrobat feature in some way, and there is evidence that many others feel the same. Please address this issue.
A small sampling of the many posts addressing this problem and the confusion it causes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Adobe/comments/1s3bp4v/lines_appearing_bold_after_saving_as_a_pdf_from/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AdobeIllustrator/comments/17eyfb4/why_does_this_happen/
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