'l' problems from Illustrator to PDF
el_reverend (134 pencils) | Tue, 2009-04-21 21:21Hi all,
once again I am here with a problem that confuses me. I recently created a postcard in illustrator to be printed and before creating a PDF from the Save As... menu item I outlined the text. Now, that should normally not give me any problems, but...
As you can see in the attached picture the l's don't look right in the PDF, BUT they look ok when I zoom in. Hmmm. So I thought maybe I should create a .ps file and then distill it. Still same problem.
I never ran into any of these problems when using InDesign, but I thought to get outside my comfort zone and try what others are doing and maybe you'll learn something new.
Can somebody shed some light on this for me and help me learn something new?
Thanks
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Commenting on this Forum topic is closed.
Problems like this are not unusal in any application. It's probably just a matter of how your monitor is rendering your art. If it zooms and prints fine, don't worry about it.
Mara
what mara said. there is a known issue in acrobat (not just from illustrator, either, same thing happens from indesign). it's a screen rendering thing where the screen is rendering lines heavier than they actually are. so, as she said, if it looks ok zoomed in on screen and it prints ok, you'll just have to live with it, since there's no actual fix that i know of.
I have a brochure project and the client wants an email version of brochure, so it needs to look good on screen. The exported pdf (doing "save as" from Illustrator, CS3, with default settings on a PC) looks fine on a Mac using Preview, but in all versions of Acrobat I've tried, the text will not render well. The text either has bolded Ls (when fonts are were outlined), OR, jagged pixellated text. It's terrible. Does anyone know why?
I can't get my Illustrator files to look consistently good as pdfs ON SCREEN. I don't care about zooming and printing. Client wants an email version. Any thoughts?
See screenshots here.
There are 4 of them.
On PC with Acrobat 8
On Mac with Preview app (best results)
On Mac with Acrobat 5
On Mac with Acrobat 7
Thanks,
Mike
If they are going to email it you should just save as a jpg and she should imbed it into the email so everyone can view it. You can also go into illustrator and depending on how sophisticated the design is you should be able to select all and paste it right into indesign where you can create fonts to outline and try saving a pdf from there.
Jessica Mahoney
www.holdtheonionplease.blogspot.com
honestly, i've never found a solution to this. it's a screen rendering issue.
There's a reason why not everything works online as it would in print. Two entirely different media. That said, however, there are plenty of PDF documents floating around that "read" just fine. You might have to change fonts.
Mara
ps: Are you aware of how much personal stuff is conveyed by the link in your post? You might want to correct that. If I went to the right files ("pdfs"), it seems you've saved these in JPEG and PNG formats. Why raster? Most people can handle PDFs now, especially if you give them a link to download the appropriate freeware for their platforms.
Mara
I've found that outlining the text before creating the pdf works when on-screen viewing is required. However the downsides of this (may) include:
Slightly larger file size,
You'll no-longer be able to copy the text out of the pdf,
You'll have to save a non-outlined version/layer for later editing,
outlined text can render differently to non-outlined text.
If you can get away with just outlining certain, small portions of text (titles for example) this can be a good solution.
I've seen this a lot. If it goes away when you zoom, then it's not really there.
I posted the other comment re: printing and zoom not good enough:
I did extensive testing yesterday. You can see a few early jpgs linked above whereby various apps and platform rendered the same file quite differently. Outlined fonts for example on Mac Acrobat 5 look downright horrific. In the end this is what I did... I found that body/copy/paragraph text when oulined has the common bolded Ls look which isn't desireable. Since body text looks pretty good as embedded font/text (not outlined) and it remains copy/pastable by reader, I'm keeping all regular text non-outlined. However, Headers and larger fonts, which look much more jagged and pixellated if not outlined, I created outlines for. The 'bold' anomoly isn't very detramental on header text because it's often already bold. The pdfs I created for the client had a nice balance of readibility, quality and file size across platforms.
Signing out, -Mike