PDF appears light when placed into Illustrator

[najami1]

Hi. I've been having a problem with PDF's in Illustrator. I often draw line work drawings in AutoCAD and print that to PDF. Then I import the PDF into Illustrator so I can create graphical diagrams. The problem I'm having is that when I place the PDF into Illustrator, the PDF appears really faded. I always have to go back to CAD just to darken all my line work. The PDF's themselves look perfectly fine when I open them, but once I place them in Illustrator it looks faint. I noticed that if I place a white box behind everything, covering the entire art board, it helps make the PDF show up better, although even when I do that, it's still not as dark as it should be.

Any ideas??

[Monika Gause]

Check the stroke weight.

Check the color of the line.

Check transparency settings.

You might need to change all of those: make the line thicker, change the color, change transparency.

Please don't expect your PDF to look exactly the same. Illustrator is not a general purpose PDF editor.

[defaulto96sx7m1dnpp]

I have been experiencing the same issue. Even when I change my line weights, line colours and line thicknessess my image on Illustrator experiences minimal to no change but the changes on the initial export pdf are drastic. I can no longer increase or change any of my lines without distorting my lineweights. The image on illustrator is, however, alomst not visible.

[default9k553lm4umbz]

I have the same issue, changing the lines and colors in autocad didn't help.. any solutions?

[Monika Gause]

The drawing is probably very large and you are zoomed out too much.