Problem with Acrobat DC - vertical lines when importing PDF

[Aidan Morrison]

Hi,

I'm exporting from Figma as PDF and importing into Acrobat DC to add links.

it's doing two things, 1 adding loads of vertical lines (please see attached screen shots when mounsing over / clicking to try to remove sections of the document turn white) 

And 2 - making text edges a bit rough on export (perhaps rasterising?) I suspect it's related to point 1...

Please can you advise to a solution?

it's only happening when passing through acrobat so I guess it's a settings issue...

many thanks,
Aidan

[Test Screen Name]

1. I think there is a good chance that the PDF is made from a large number of narrow strips of graphics. These are not joining perfectly. You can check this by zooming to different magifications; if the vertical lines move around or disappear, that is the issue. I don't know of any fix.

2. Where and how do you export? As what?

[Aidan Morrison]

Hi,

1. Thanks, I'll answer 1 and 2 at the same time as I believe it's relevant...

It's exported directly from Figma, using their export to PDF function. There are no settings to play about with, literally export all frames as PDF's, each frame (equivalent to an artboard in Adobe) has been initiated as 1920 x 1080
it's curious and a bit frustrating. 

I wonder if it could be the gradient function that's causing the the problem as perhaps that's downsampled to vertical strips/?

Do any adobe people have any insight into this please?

[gary_sc]

Hi Momo64,

I had to look it up because I've never heard of Figma before. (Looks like potentially good software!)

Here's the deal: I am pretty sure that the PDF generation is being done EITHER by Figma itself or more likely Apple, but not by Acrobat. A number of years ago Adobe released their ownership of the PDF format and it is now an ISO standard. At that point, any company can generate PDFs but there is no law that they have to be ISO compliant. In sad fact, VERY few are. Apple and Microsoft are not.

You can quickly identify who/what generated the PDF by opening up the file in Acrobat Pro and then press Command-d which opens up the Properties Panel. The first tab is Description and half-way down it will show:

Once you see who the PDF Producer is, you know who to "blame" for the quality of the PDF.

One thing you can try is when you wish to generate a PDF, select "Print" (Command-p) and then in the bottom there's a dropdown menu titled PDF. Mousedown on that. You'll see:

2nd to top is Save as PDF, this is Apple's PDF generator. But further down is Save as Adobe PDF. If you have Acrobat Pro you can see this, select it (if yo do not see this than you do not have Acrobat Pro installed). This IS going through Adobe's PDF generator. Let's see what that does.

Now one caveot in this is Figma. Since it's web based, I do not have a clue as to how this may affect and change things. If this does not work, I'm not sure what can be done.

Let us know,

[seanrainey]

@Aidan Morrison The best thing to do is to uncheck the box labelled 'Show bounding boxes'. I'm not quite sure of the issue or cause, but this always seems to remove it for me.