Please don't change the subject line in the thread. Makes it impossible to follow by email.

But what I can't understand is - this problem with the thick Ls has been around for ages - years I reckon. What are the developers doing? We've all paid for these expensive updates year in, year out - and still the problem hasn't been fixed. In that time how many thousands of designers must have had to apologise to their clients and explain that the Ls are not supposed to be bold - its just a strange thing that Acrobat/Adobe Reader does?

Only those "thousands of designers" who outline their text.

Fact is, this is not a problem with thick Ls. It's a problem with thick *drawings* of Ls. If you outline your type, a lot of ugly things happen. The worst offenders are in the area of rendering for electronic display.

Stop outlining. Start embedding. I've seen font substitution problems in PDFs, but none in the last 10 years. Check proofs before printing. About 1996, a client of mine decided that everything had been working so well she could stop looking at bluelines before signing off on them. She got 20,000 copies of a book printed in all italic (except for the italic text, which printed in roman).

Ken

Hi Kenneth

Thanks for your reply. I will embed text in the future but your example of the 'italic book' just confirms that pdfs - embedded or otherwise are still not completely reliable. You mention 'bluelines' - do you mean printed proofs? Problem is that, in my neck of the woods, printers are abandoning all forms of paper proofs and just sending pdfs to sign off. I had a job recently where I sent the printer an InDesign pdf. The printer then sent me their paginated pdf. I approved it and the job was printed. When I got the job back there were two lines of text missing. I checked the proof that I'd signed off and the text was there (This text wasn't embedded - it was part of a placed illustrator file that had been converted to paths). Anyway I got on the phone to the printer ready to play hell with him only to discover that when he viewed exactly the same pdf, he couldn't see the extra text - so he never new it was there!

So I originally sent him a pdf where I could see the extra text.

... He received it but he couldn't see the extra text.

... He sent me his paginated pdf for approval - and I could see the text.

- Neither of us new the other was seeing the text differently. So I couldn't sue him because all his records showed the extra text never existed. And the proof that I approved - as far as he was concerned - never had the extra text on it.

Anyway, since then, I've always sent an additional set of jpegs of each page and said I'm only approving the job on the basis that they have checked that the jpegs match the pdf. But it's far from ideal and I'm not sure what legal rights I'd have if there was a similar print problem again.

Bob - Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!

You're right. And I've now set up Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat Pro to spot the problem in future. Obviously my printer must have had his version of Acrobat Pro set to Preferences - Page Display - Use Overprint Preview - Always.

The mystery solved at last!

And the root of the problem: Freehand. The Illustrator file was originally a Freehand file with the fonts outlined in Freehand before it ever got to Illustrator. And Freehand was always notorious for turning colours to overprint when outlining.

Cheers!

Thanks Kenneth for your advice.

I'll certainly have a go at your procedure for rasterizing pdfs for proof purposes.

You'll see in the reply above that Bob Levine has solved the mystery of my missing text.

So all in all I'm now feeling a lot more positive about working with pdfs!

Cheers

I often get that thick letter 'l' and I always export...it doesn't print out

that way, though.

Nice summary, Mattw0023. I've been horrified by this problem in PDFs for many years, and I've sought solutions (or at least explanations) now and then, without success. But this thread (and a few of its links) certainly nails it.

Even though savvy PDF creators now know how to eliminate the problem (albeit sometimes with font editing or unacceptably tedious hand editing), and even though savvy PDF readers now know to turn off Enhance thin lines, it's utterly amazing to me that the Acrobat team hasn't fixed this problem. The problem again came to my attention most grotesquely this morning when I received my PDF of the 2013 February issue of Scientific American. There are several pages right at the beginning which are peppered with dozens of gigantic sans-serif ones and lower-case els, so much so that the whole page looks like a cruel joke on the publisher.

The same issue also displays tons of examples of jagged baselines, especially with one of their main fonts (BrunelDeck Bold, 10pt.) which looks terrible well into high magnifications.

Clearly, Scientific American would be shocked to see how bad their PDF magazine looks to many of their customers, and I'm sure somebody at Adobe would be equally chagrinned to see how just a tiny bit of ignorance on the part of legions of end-users, or just a tiny bit of ignorance on the part of numerous respected publishers, is producing such a clunky unprofessional result. We may speculate on why the magazine hasn't managed to eliminate the problem, but ultimately (and rightfully) it all reflects on Acrobat, which is a shame, since it's the only near-universal page display format we have. The fact that this problem has been around, unfixed, for many years just makes the whole situation more astonishing.

Hi Dov,

Well, I didn't mean to imply that Adobe could solve this problem -- I meant that Adobe most certainly can and should solve this problem. It's slightly ridiculous that an app specifically designed to provide precise representation of typography and graphics would tolerate, without warning, such an egregious violation of accurate reproduction.

Note that many commenters in this old thread (for an old problem) point out that other text rendering engines (e.g., Apple's) don't have this problem. Note also that everyone has found that when printed, there is no problem. This suggests that the problem can be solved, not that we have to provide special instructions as a work-around.

The essence of it seems to be a choice the Acrobat developers made long ago concerning how "four-anchor-point" rectangles should be rendered. Coupled with the "enhance thin lines" feature, outlined rectangular glyphs end up looking terribly inaccurate. If this isn't an obscure technical glitch, then I don't know what is. Surely you don't believe end-users should have to be warned about this kind of thing?

If the problem is, as you imply, not Adobe's, then the solution is a classic waste of resources -- thousands of end-users and PDF creators must be taught to accomodate a short-coming in something that one or two programmers could resolve. PDFs are being used more and more as end products, not just for print preview or document interchange, and converting to outlines is a perfectly rational thing to do. Since it's not an error in the outline conversion, why not give the venerable Acrobat engine a tweak so that it's not causing problems for anyone? (Of course, the real tweak isn't in the engine itself, but merely in the implementation of Enhance Thin Lines.)

If nothing else, why not make ETL (a) not the default, and (b) insert a note to the user alongside the setting ("May cause small rectangles to render inaccurately"). I'm certain that if even just this small concession were made, anyone noticing that note would probably slap his/her forehead and exclaim, "So that's what was causing that!"

Considering the swift and ubiquitous trend towards higher resolution displays, perhaps the ETL feature itself is obsolete. (Its only real purpose, as far as I can tell, is to prevent fine lines from disappearing, and there are almost certainly better algorithms for doing that.)

Although the thread is indeed old, it was especially helpful. I've been running into the issue it addresses consistently for about a decade. Isn't it at all relevant that people still need this information? Adobe can certainly fix this problem.

Respectfully,

Allen

[changed "four-control-point" to "four-anchor-point" - ac]

Hear Hear!

I completely agree Ashtangakasha.

Adobe have known about this problem since at least 2008 - probably some time before that. It's inexcusable that they haven't fixed it yet.

Bob, I completely agree that this discussion should be on the Acrobat forum. But I couldn't resist responding to Matt's summary of the situation. That precipitated further discussion, which was also hard to resist. And your post is also irresistible. It's a catch-22! What's a lad to do?

Why is this an issue if it's for print only? Well, for one thing, people send PDFs back and forth as "soft proofs" all the time, and the "four-anchor-rectangle" bug causes enough confusion to be worth fixing.

A press-ready PDF with outlined type is indeed preferred by many a quick-print service center. Perhaps you just deal with the top-flight print houses; I have to work with what's available in small towns, many of whom can't print their way out of a paper bag. (To coin a phrase.)

As for "shouldn't be doing this anyway," well, gee, I'm really sorry. I'll be sure everyone involved is dealt with, but since some of them are paying for "doing this," I have to go easy on them.

And I promise that I won't post any more replies on this thread. (Unless the temptation is truly irresistible.)

Allen