Participant

Question

Anti-alias in Acrobat create bold letters

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
December 5, 2019
2 replies
1636 views

Everythime there is outline text on a PDF, with a sans-serif font, every perfect rectangle letters (i and l mainly) become bolder. It's clearly an anti-alias issue only visible on screen.

I can't count the hours lost on explaining clients that it will print correctly. Often abandandonning explaination and sending JPG version of the PDF. Its horrible, but at least it look consistant.

I know it's better to keep text in «text mode» and not outlining it. But sometimes, we dont have the choice, or we use an already outlined logo…

I dont know why Acrobat do this and not Illustrator or InDesign (or even macOS Preview)… Their rendering method are probably different. Unfortunatly, my clients like to use Acrobat.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Abambo

Community Expert

Especially with outlined text, Acrobat cannot optimize anymore the characters for every size of the screen. It's a tradeoff between high quality display and speed. But I understand your pain when you need to explain what happens.

I too, I distrust sometimes my own creations. I need then to look at the elements at a higher magnification, that corresponds more the print resolution just to check that the file is correct.

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer

Amal.

Community Manager

Hi there

We are sorry for the trouble. As described above, outline text on a PDF, with a sans-serif font becomes bolder.

We need some more information for a better understanding:

Is this behavior with a particular PDF file or with all the PDFs? If its a file specific issue, please share the file with us for further investigation. Please upload the file on the document cloud here (https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/home/), generate the link and share the link with us.
Do you have Adobe Acrobat Reader DC (Freeware) or Adobe Acrobat DC (Subscription) and what is the version of the application and the Mac OS? To check the version of the application please use the link: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/identify-product-version.html
Make sure you have the latest version 19.21.20056. Go to Help and check for Updates.

Also, please share the screenshot of the issue you are experiencing so we can look into it and assist you better.

We are here for help, just need more information

Regards

Amal

P

PéoAuthor

Participant

Hi, thanks for your interest,

I've taken 2 screenshot of a logo I work with often for the government and each time I have to explain that it wont look like this when printed. The screenshots were taken at different zoom to show how it change. I have Acrobat Pro, it's up to date. But I can't say for my clients.

I have seen the same thing on other projects, as soon as there is an outline font with straight characters. It happens whith PDF generated from Illustrator and InDesign. Photoshop don't have the same problem since it's converted to pixels.

The macOS application «Preview» render well the same PDF without this glitch. But I prefer when clients open document in Acrobat, for the comments functions and better rendering of the transparency effects.

Thanks for your help

P.-O.

https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3Af3ed9d2f-9843-49d5-a78d-8b3b31b5ef5b

https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3A8819dd44-1f57-456c-8795-17b76c45679a

https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn%3Aaaid%3Ascds%3AUS%3A19a715c8-381b-4c51-8995-e584e867354a

Amal.

Community Manager

Hi there,

Thank you for sharing the screenshots of the issue.

Could you please share the sample PDF file with us for further investigation.

Regards

Amal

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