Illustrator save as pdf

[Roachiest Roach Meister]

Hi there

When saving an illustrator (version 26.5) file as a pdf, the resolution of all my images becomes low res.

I am unable to preview the pdf in acrobat as high res to share with my client for review. No matter the option selected the images always displays as pixellated.

ON save program keeps telling me document will be displayed at a smaller size because the canvas is too large??

I've never had this problem before. 

Please help.

[Document Geek]

If you want me send me a copy of your document to take a look at, I would be happy to. You can send me a direct message with a cloud link.

[Roachiest Roach Meister]

File struggling to upload to cloud... going to go ahead with my indesign plan and see if that works.

Will pester you later if it doesn't

[Roachiest Roach Meister]

Sent you the link

[Roachiest Roach Meister]

Do you work for Adobe?

[Roachiest Roach Meister]

Does Adobe have actual employees working to help customers solve their software issues or is everyone a fellow adobe user themselves... it doesn't seem like they have a support team to aid their customers.

[Luke Jennings3]

This is a user forum although Adobe employees drop by and contribute on occasion. Try saving as a pdf using the Illustrator default settings, when you save as a pdf you can choose which version of Acrobat can correctly display the pdf (compatibility) your message is suggesting you need 1.6 compatibility or later, and the [High Quality Print] setting will "dumb down" a pdf to 1.4.

I'm not sure what is in your pdf that is causing the problem, and I'm not sure this will fix it, but it might. Also, it's almost always preferable to retain vector information over raster, for size and quality issues, as has been mentioned. Try optimizing your original (vector) pdf in Acrobat to reduce the size. (File> Save as other> Optimized pdf).

Edit, it occurred to me you are probably using multiple artboards, and you may have accidently enlarged one of them so it is too big for early versions of Acrobat to display it?

[Roachiest Roach Meister]

The original images provided were all pngs - scanned artwork. There are no vectors images.

Nope, have tried exporting with compatibility for 1.6. - images still blurry.

[Roachiest Roach Meister]

Checked all the sizes of the artboards... all the same...

[Luke Jennings3]

What operating system are you using? How big is the final pdf (in mb)? 

Did you try using the Illustrator default settings when saving as pdf?

[Roachiest Roach Meister]

Using Windows 11. I reset to default settings and saved again... same thing. Images not displaying clearly. And the file size doesn't make sense either because it's approx. 3 - 5MB everytime. I even tried saving with illustrator editing cap on - the pdf was like 0.5GB but still blurry...

[Luke Jennings3]

So the images look fine in Illustrator and pixilated in Acrobat? how does the pdf look when you open it in a browser?

A 39 page pdf loaded with hi-res images would probably be closer to 500MB than 3-5MB, although optimizing, compressing and downsampling (for proofing purposes) in Acrobat could make it much smaller.

Try creating a new Illustrator file and place one of the scans, save as pdf using default settings, how does that look? You can combine single pdfs in Acrobat. (Tools> Combine files).

If the problem is also happening in Photoshop, that suggests a possible hardware issue?

[Roachiest Roach Meister]

Definitely illustrator acting up... just completed redesiging in InDesign and it saved the pdf perfectly... with no fuss.

Something the software developers need to look into... also the updated version of Photoshop (tools don't work correctly or not at all) Thank you Kelly, Luke and Zballing. Hope this issue can be fixed for future updates

[Roachiest Roach Meister]

Different issues altogether for photoshop.... don't get me started.