Exported document of 1920x1080 px as PDF but when viewed at 100% in PDF it's huge.

[King and Kingdom]

Hello guys!

I am trying to export a document from Indesign into a PDF. The size of the spreads is 1920x1080 px and when I open it in Acrobat on my monitor (Full HD) the view is set at 53% and some texts and images look really bad. If I put it on 100% it gets really huge.

When I hit ctrl + L to go into presentation mode it's all fine but I want to send it to a client and I don't want to worry they may not look at it in presentation mode.

Am I missing something when exporting?

[rob day]

Hi @King and Kingdom , If you set your InDesign rulers to inches your 1920 x 1080 pixel page will measure 26.66” x 15”. The default 100% view in Acrobat and InDesign shows the 26.66” x 15” print output dimensions.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I find working with pixel dimensions to be problematic no matter what the export model is. (ID is not good at things such as doing web banner ads at pixel dimensions.)

I often do presentations for HD scale/ratio, and simply use pages that are of some comfortable size to work with, in inches or picas and in the HD ratio. Either 19.2 x 10.8 inches, or halve that. It produces full resolution in the PDF at modest file sizes. There is no need to try to export to a specific screen resolution/pixel size; Reader does a fine job of fitting full pages at any adapted resolution. Export to that specific size will just create lower-quality images, for the most part.

[rob day]

If the export is always going to be to an image format—JPEG or PNG—then you can easily get a matching pixel dimension by setting the export Resolution to 72. The pixel ruler unit is just a convenience, so you don’t have to do the math—target pixel dimension / page dimension as inches. It isn’t very useful for PDF exports

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The critical point here may be a common misunderstanding (not necessarily the OP's) about how PDF works. A lot of questions and issues seem to revolve around the notion that it's (inherently) pixel-image pages.

Letting PDF use its vector nature to fully exploit resolution issues for graphics and type is a key bit of understanding.