Output to PDF printer looks terrible.

Report · Feb 19, 2016

One of my users' documents all look terrible when printed to PDF. The text is not sharp and some lines (indicated 1 and 2 on the screenshot) have part of the line cut off. This is Excel 2010, using Acrobat X.

I have changed the print settings to high quality and I have ensured there is no page scaling going on, either from Excel or in the PDF printer settings.

All the numbers and client names in the image are pixelated because they contain proprietary information. That is intentional and unrelated to the issue at hand.

Thank you!

Report · Feb 20, 2016

Hi AlexG2490,

Please provide the exact dot version of the software & OS installed at your system .Also check whether is there any update available for the software after going through "help > check for updates "

Follow this thread to reset the preferences of Acrobat Preferences :- https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1595848

Please check with the 'Print as image' option while printing the document . Please try to recreate the document & then print to check whether it works or not .

Is this happening with this document only or with others as well, and the name of the application using which the document was created originally .

Regards,

Yatharth

Report · Feb 20, 2016

I assume that's the on-screen PDF with the problem? If so, print-as-image isn't relevant, but here are more thoughts.

1. Maybe it's Excel doing it. At least do a print preview in Excel, with the PDF printer selected, in case it shows these problems up - no point looking onward if so.

2. Generally you get better results using PDFMaker - the Acrobat ribbon added to Excel.

3. Nonsharp text may just be a personal preference reaction to Acrobat's text smoothing.

(a) zoom in to see if the letters are clear if enlarged.

(b) experiment with different text smoothing settings.

Report · Feb 24, 2016

Thanks everyone. Yes, this is the on-screen PDF.

Excel is not the culprit. Printing to a regular printer from Excel works fine. Looking at the preview in Print Preview, this is also fine.

We tried PDFMaker but the sheet in question uses macros and scripting, and with PDFMaker the buttons and controls from the spreadsheet are on the printout, messing with the formatting.

This is Acrobat 10.1.16.13. I just updated it to the latest version. Same issue. This is happening to all documents by one user created and printed from Excel 2013.

Here's a side by side sample of the same page from two separate machines.

Bad:

Good: