why are Word docs being saved as blurry pdf's?

When I use Word to convert to PDF, my PDFs look blurry. But when I use the Adobe Acrobat Chrome extension, my PDFs look crisp!

Hi Miken511837,

You might already have moved on from this question, but in case anyone else is facing this issue I thought I'd post. It’s now June 2020 and judging from many communities, boards and discussion threads the issue of why Microsoft Word seems to convert to low-quality Adobe Acrobat PDFs seems to still plague a lot of people. It bugged me for a couple days and following is the solution I stumbled on today.

1. After you convert a Word file to an Adobe Acrobat PDF on a Mac, open the PDF file. If the font(s) in the PDF look different than the fonts in your Word file (low-quality, pixelated, etc), try these steps:
2. In either Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat Pro, go to Preferences > Page Display
3. For the menu item “Smooth Text:” select either “Monitor” or “For Laptop/LCD screens” (you'll likely find that it's set to "None", which appears to be the problem; it's a visual setting, and doesn't appear to have anything to do with embedded fonts, font licensing, etc, as many users have concluded.)
4. Click "OK" and then look at your PDF. Hopefully, your document fonts, images, etc, should look identical to the way they appear in your Word doc.

I've included a screengrab of the Preferences window below. This method fixed the appearance of fonts in my PDFs. (I'm still not sure how this happened as I've used Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat Pro with zero issues for years; I'm not sure how the setting got changed.) I hope this helps others who may face this issue now and in the future.

Best,

PL from Toronto

Hi Miken,

When you convert the Word file with an image to PDF, the image gets compressed while conversion.

As it is not a vector image, it becomes little blurry in the PDF.

However, you may try to change the conversion settings to reduce the compression using the steps mentioned below:

- Open the document and go to the Acrobat tab at the top menu bar.

- Click on Preferences and select High-quality print from the conversion setting drop-down list.

- You may also check the Advanced settings there.

Check if that helps.

Let us know how it goes.

Regards,

Meenakshi