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ethan_7899
Participant
August 3, 2025
Question

PDF Not Displaying Properly After Export from InDesign – Blurry Text and Images

  • August 3, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 168 views

Hi everyone,

I'm running into an issue with PDFs I export from Adobe InDesign. After exporting, the PDF opens fine in Acrobat, but some of the text appears slightly blurry, and images lose a bit of sharpness. This happens even when I export using High Quality Print or Press Quality settings. I am doing it for my game hailey adventure game.

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:

  • Ensuring all images are 300 DPI and embedded properly

  • Checking font embedding and transparency flattener settings

  • Viewing the PDF on different systems (issue persists)

  • Disabling "smooth text/images" in Acrobat preferences

Still, the exported file doesn’t look as sharp as it should, especially on-screen. Has anyone else faced this issue? Is it an Acrobat rendering problem, or something wrong with my export settings?

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Ethan

2 replies

G
Gord@APL
Inspiring
August 4, 2025

Further to @creative explorer 's advice, and assuming your images are starting out as 72ppi, it's generally preferable to ignore the standard wisdom regarding image resolution when it comes to screenshots. Any kind of fancy resampling should be switched off (use 'Nearest Neighbour' in Photoshop), and enlargements should be in increments of 100%. Only ever scale them down on the page.

 

Of course, this is more relevant when print is your final output... Since PDF output may be automatically downsampling, your results still may not be ideal, but TIFF compression should still yield better results.

    creative explorer
    Community Expert
    creative explorerCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 4, 2025

    @ethan_7899 question... what type of images are being saved? JPEG or TIFF? JPEG uses compression for its images, which is a "lossy" compression method. Even at the highest quality setting, a bit of image data is discarded, which can contribute to the "soft" or slightly blurry appearance. While TIFF is 'lossless' compression which preserves all original data when saved! 

    Secondly, and I get my students saving their images at 300 dpi, but then they start to scale it in InDesign! Check the "Effective PPI" in your InDesign Links panel. This needs to be 300dpi as well. If it's below that, this is likely the reason. 

    Something else to think about....Because this is from a game, chances are the images are being saved as web quality, RGB at 72 ppi. When you re-save the images to 300, and if you turn on re-sample, you also lose some quality as well. The software has to make up new pixels to fill in the gaps. This process is called interpolation. The software analyzes the surrounding pixels and creates new ones based on an algorithm. This always results in a loss of sharpness and can lead to a blurry or soft appearance. You can't add detail that wasn't there to begin with.

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