Tebuchet screen rendering issues in Acrobat

[Dougie1802]

I have created an information sheet using MS Trebuchet on the Mac in InDesign and exported to PDF. When viewing the PDF the font does not display correctly, some area looks bold. If you change the percentage zoom page size the font changes. It look fine at 130% but at 134% some of the sentences in paragraphs look bold?

[Thomas Phinney]

Is there any transparency, drop shadow, gradient, or any other special effect on some graphic element that is touching or even just near the text? This includes text boxes themselves, btw. Related: what version of InDesign are you using?

Cheers,

T

[Dougie1802]

Thanks for your help Thomas, I am using InDesign CS4 on the Mac. There are drop shadows on the design but not near the text. I have attached a screen shot of part of the info sheet so that you can see what is happening.

[Thomas Phinney]

Hmmm. Nope, I'm afraid I have no helpful ideas. No clue why that would happen.

Cheers,

T

[Dov Isaacs]

I suspect that premature transparency flattening is the source of the problem. What happens if you export PDF as PDF/X-4 or any of the settings with PDF 1.4 or greater?

           - Dov

[Dougie1802]

It doesn't seem to happen with other fonts, only Trebuchet. I have been in discussion with a typographic designer who suggests it may be a combination of Trebuchet not being a ClearType font and therefore old technology and the text styling not being clean when the text is copied from Word into InDesign. The suggestion was to use TextEdit to remove any font styling and then reformat in InDesign.

[Thomas Phinney]

I have been in discussion with a typographic designer who suggests it may be a combination of Trebuchet not being a ClearType font and therefore old technology and the text styling not being clean when the text is copied from Word into InDesign

Urm, both of those suggestions are gibberish absurdities.

First, whether a font is "a ClearType font" is just a question of whether the font's hinting is specifically optimized for ClearType. Non-ClearType fonts work fine under ClearType as well, and in any case Acrobat doesn't use ClearType at all—it uses Adobe's own font rendering technology.

Text styling is only an issue when the text is styled to a non-existent font. For example, you style some text bold, and there is no available bold font. This is only a problem in applications that allow such "faux" styles and try to "simulate" the bold or italic effect. But InDesign doesn't allow faux styles, hence there is no way that there could be a faux styling issue in a PDF made from InDesign. (I imagine there are ways to get faux styles into Acrobat, especially if the fonts aren't embedded, but I'm not sure I've seen it, aside from Acrobat's own substitution fonts. But none of that is relevant here.)

So I don't know what the problem IS, but I can tell you with some certainty that those are two things it IS NOT.

My first thought, like Dov's, was that it was some sort of transparency and flattening issue. But the details of where the text is and which text is affected make that seem less obviously plausible. Still, you might try as an experiment deleting the object(s) with the drop shadow on that page and seeing what happens. Or even copying that text box to an empty page.

Regards,

T

[Dougie1802]

I have created a page with nothing more than the text as you suggested, unfortunately that has not made any difference, please see attached. If you have any other suggestions I would be very interested to try them. Thank you.

[Dougie1802]

I should point out the text looks fine in InDesign, which suggests Acrobat's font rendering doesn't like Trebuchet. When viewing the text in Acrobat it looks fine up to 131%, then from 132% to 164% it gets ugly (depending on the percentage of zoom different areas of the text are effected), 165% and over the text looks good again. I think the latest version of Trebuchet is 2006.