Properly viewable and properly printable files NEEDED!
When creating a final file from Illustrator for a printer, I change type into outlines so that there will be no font problems. Then I save as a PDF. The PDF is VERY inconsistent in how it shows straight lines of letters. ie: lower case "L", cap "I", hyphens, dashes, and other letters with "straight" lines -- p, d, M, etc. The pdfs look terrible unless you blow them up very large. AND when you print them out, you can also see the differences in thickness of the letters on different printers. Questions: How do I tell my customer "Oh, ignore that" when they see a terrible looking proof? How will I KNOW if a file sent to a printer will print properly or not if I can't see or print a "good" file here? If a customer sends my file to their printer and prints 1000 letterheads and the letters are inconsistent, are you going to pay for that? These are supposed to be programs usable for graphics and printing. It happens with InDesign also. I pay a monthly fee and I can't get the programs to work properly. What's up with this?
Donna
shared this idea
If a PDF file is viewed in Acrobat, one can disable the option which tries to make thin lines fatter in Preferences > Page Display > Enhance Thin Lines.
This is something viewers make to deal with the now-unhinted results outlined fonts. With properly prepared PDFs outlining is not necessary and cause more problems than solves.
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All comments below are true.
Also, the fat lines you are seeing for straight lines is not something that Illustrator creates, but an option in Acrobat your client can toggle in Preferences > Page Display > Enhance Thin Lines. With this off, Acrobat will stop to try to make thin lines fatter (that is trying to post-hint them).
But you should just stop outlining text and use those print shops which can handle properly prepared PDFs, without reimporting them.
It’s definitely not an Ai’s fault. -
Thomas Phinney commented
Fonts have extra data called “hinting” that helps the rendering system maintain a consistency in things like letter thickness even when few pixels are involved. Adobe solved this problem when they invented hinting for PostScript Type 1 fonts back in the early 1980s.
When you convert text to outlines, you are destroying that hinting data, and telling the world that you don’t mind one-pixel differences between different instances of same-thickness strokes.
There is no app yet developed that has a workaround for this problem. The correct answer is: don’t convert your text to outlines. This is a “font problem” ... that you are creating.
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Lukas Engqvist commented
Converting text to outlines takes much of the smart programming in fonts and throws it away. Fonts have technology called hinting which tells computers and rips how to handle mathematic calculations so that strokes and spacing are consistent. If you convert text to curves you only have the vector points. If you also started the document as a webb document you may get even more strange effects if strokes are aligned to pixel grid. It may be a limitation of workflow rather than of software.