Jagged dotted line in Illustrator

[Bartlomiej11]

Hey, 

I've got problem after exporting my file to PDF. The dotted line I created in Illustrator is looking very jagged in the PDF file. 

Is there any way to get rid of it? 

[Monika Gause]

Check out Acrobat's display options. Maybe you have turned off anti-aliasing

[Bartlomiej11]

Hey, thank you for answering my question! I'm not sure if it's turned off or on, would you mind sharing where I can check it? I'm attaching screenshot from my Page Display settings. 

[Monika Gause]

Smooth is turned on.

Your second screenshot shows, that this seems to happen in Acrobat.

Can you try and turn on Overprint preview? Perhaps that makes it better.

[Bartlomiej11]

Thank you for answering. I turned on Overprint view, and unfortunately, it didn't change anything. 

[Ton Frederiks · Accepted solution]

And since this is about lines, try turning off Enhance Thin Lines...

[Bartlomiej11]

Hey, thank you for answering my question. Turning off Enhance Thing Lines helped me to get rid of the problem, thank you so much! 🙂 

[Ton Frederiks]

Good to hear that helped.

[marliton]

Hi. If you zoom in on those dots, are they still jagged?

[Bartlomiej11]

Hey, thanks for answering my question! This is the way those dots are looking like after zooming in: 

[marliton]

Well, the dots seem to be ok when zooming in, so it's a preview issue and you shouldn't have problems with printing.

[Anshul_Saini]

Hi @Bartlomiej11,

Sorry to hear about the trouble you are facing. I would like to know if the steps suggested above by @Ton Frederiks @marliton @Monika Gause worked for you? If you are viewing the PDF in Illustrator and seeing these jagged lines, I would suggest you try toggling between GPU & CPU mode using the ctrl+e shortcut and check if these jagged lines are visible or not. If you don't see them, then your output file or print will not have these jagged dotted lines. If this doesn't help as well, then I would request you to share the download link to your Ai file with us here or via DM with me. We will check it on our end.

Kindly update the discussion if you still need assistance with it. We'd be happy to help.

Thanks,

Anshul Saini

[Bartlomiej11]

Hey, thank you so much for your help! @Ton Frederiks advice was actually the right one. Turning off Enhance Thing Lines helped me to get rid of the problem. Once again, thank you!

[Anshul_Saini]

Glad to hear that, @Bartlomiej11. Please feel free to reach out if you run into any other questions or issues in the future. We'd be happy to help. Thanks!

Regards,

Anshul Saini

[Kurt Gold]

I've seen those kinds of preview glitches in Acrobat many times on many different machines during the past years. No matter what smoothness settings are used in Acrobat's preferences. Also, type objects often look incredibly terrible (depending on the font that is used). PDF files that display very well in "lower class" PDF viewers like Firefox or the like may look just lousy in Acrobat.

As far as I can see it is a serious internal Acrobat problem.