: Outlined illustrator poster appears to have degraded font I made a poster in AIllustrator for a scientific conference and was told by the printer to outline it before converting to pdf for printing.

@Turnbaugh909

Acrobat and reader have a small preference to enhance visibility of thin lines. This preference alters how a PDF may appear on screen but doesn't alter how it prints. This can often cause lowercase Ls and uppercase Is to look thicker than they actually are.....



Here's a discussion at Adobe's site about that very issue.

Simply unchecking that preference item may cause you to see the ls and Is properly. Again, this is an on screen issue, not a print issue.

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@Alves566

I just learned from Scott's answer that what I thought was an artifact was an actual feature of Adobe Acrobat, so I have edited my answer and left it just as an illustration of how this feature alters the outlined copy.

This is an example of copy set to Myriad Pro Regular 12pt, then outlined, then saved as PDF. I opened in Adobe Acrobat and viewed it at 100%. Notice how many of the vertical strokes of the copy seem to be darker.



Now, if I view it at 200%. the problem seems to disappear



Apparently, and this is a guess, Adobe Acrobat, when the feature described in Scott's answer is active, rounds up the thickness of the vertical strokes to the closest pixel. This makes anti-aliasing unnecessary but makes the strokes look darker (because of the lack of semitransparent pixels) or thicker.

To check if this is what is happening in your case, open your outlined PDF and zoom in. Does the artifact disappear? If it does, I would not worry about it. You could also print a section of it at 100% to be extra sure.

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