A fix for jagged fonts in PDFs exported from Pages
Apr 04, '07 07:30:04AM • Contributed by: aptmunich
Apr 04, '07 07:30:04AM • Contributed by: aptmunich
We use Pages to create a lot of our product information, and ran into an issue whilst creating PDFs: On two of our marketing Macs, using the Export to PDF feature would result in certain fonts appearing pixelated when viewed in Preview. They looked fine, however, in Acrobat Reader. Even more mysteriously, the same export worked flawlessly on another Mac. Both of the fonts were both smaller than 8pt.
It turns out that the setting under System Preferences » Appearances that sets the smallest font size to be aliased on-screen also influences PDF creation (which makes sense, as OS X renders everything on-screen as a PDF, I think).
So if your PDFs have fonts that aren't aliased, simply lower the font smoothing setting when you create the PDF, and the problem will be avoided. You can then raise the threshold again afterwards; the PDFs will still look fine.
It turns out that the setting under System Preferences » Appearances that sets the smallest font size to be aliased on-screen also influences PDF creation (which makes sense, as OS X renders everything on-screen as a PDF, I think).
So if your PDFs have fonts that aren't aliased, simply lower the font smoothing setting when you create the PDF, and the problem will be avoided. You can then raise the threshold again afterwards; the PDFs will still look fine.
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