Print Quality suffers after I flatten a PDF.

[lucyperez]

After I flatten a PDF (using Adobe Acrobat XI Pro) the print quality has lowered and the text comes out fuzzy. I have tried using the Action Wizard and the Optimize PDF function and no luck.

[Dov Isaacs]

By “flatten” can we assume you mean transparency flattening?

If so, why are you doing that? Flattening transparency is absolutely not a recommended workflow. If you have text interacting with raster images in transparency, your text is likely being rasterized, possibly at a low resolution. Let transparency be handled at either display or print time for best results.

          - Dov

[lucyperez]

Thanks for responding so quickly. The documents we send to our clients (electronically) can be "edited", if they know how to use adobe. So i'd like the document to be flattened and non-editable, or so at least not easily editable (if that makes sense). Flattening does the trick, however when the client prints the document on their end, the print quality suffers.

[Willi Adelberger]

Did you put the text above images? Or it is covered by an image or any object with a transparency or an effect? I recommend to work with layers an put images in a layer below the text layers.

[lucyperez]

Thanks for replying, no there are no images in this PDF file. Its an all text document.

[Willi Adelberger]

If you have no transparency, how does flattening come in? How do you create PDFs?

[lucyperez]

The document gets "saved" as a PDF file, and the text can be edited (by going to Tools | Content Editing | Edit Text & Images) unless it gets flattened or is password protected. The partners at this firm don't want to use passwords, seeing as how easily you can bypass that security by simply dragging the PDF file into a google chrome browser. I hope i made sense and didn't confuse you.. i can be wordy at times. Thanks again for trying to help me.

[Willi Adelberger]

Hm, but this is not flattening. Your are outlining fonts? If you want to do that, you should use the PDF Preflight functionality to Convert Text to curves.

But this will always influence the antialiasing, I think this is the problem you are experiencing.

[lucyperez]

I just seem to be having no luck with this issue

[Willi Adelberger]

I think Acrobat does what it should do.

What happens when you change in Preferences Smooth Line Art as it is no longer text but line art?

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

Sorry to break the news to you, but even doing what you call “flattening” (we prefer to call it “ruining”) a PDF file doesn't prevent someone from doing editing. Even a raster bitmap can be yanked into Photoshop and edited, replacing text albeit with a tad more difficulty that using the text editing tool in Acrobat.

All your “flattening” is really doing is messing up your content by violating the basic attributes of the PDF imaging model in which text is intelligently scaled using fonts, vector objects are geometrically scaled, and raster images are handled as best as possible, albeit with some loss of quality whenever scaled and/or rotated in any way for display or print.

No politics intended but text realized via fonts trumps outlined text trumps rasterized text. Sorry, but that's the way it is!

          - Dov