why do the "i"'s and the "l"'s look wrong in pdf files

[gabagoo]

I have seen this before and today a client asked why the "I"'s and the "l"'s looked odd. I opened the file and you see these 2 letters much bolder than everything else...I also noticed if you zoom in they look correct. Any reason for this?

 

[J Hill Designs]

rendering anomaly

edit: even happens when converted to curves.

 

[P Wagner]

I have seen this before and today a client asked why the "I"'s and the "l"'s looked odd. I opened the file and you see these 2 letters much bolder than everything else...I also noticed if you zoom in they look correct. Any reason for this?

Display resolution limitation.

 

[Tim Aucoin]

This is a rendering bug with Adobe Acrobat/Reader. It only display it as a thicker stroke but it prints fine. If you open the same file on a Mac via the "Preview" application, the problem goes away.

By turning OFF "Enhance thin lines" in Adobe Reader's preference, you can eliminate the display problem. But since the files can be distributed to other people over the internet, this may not be an option!
Oh, and it only happens when you convert your font to outlines before saving as the PDF file!

 

[gabagoo]

This is a rendering bug with Adobe Acrobat/Reader. It only display it as a thicker stroke but it prints fine. If you open the same file on a Mac via the "Preview" application, the problem goes away.

By turning OFF "Enhance thin lines" in Adobe Reader's preference, you can eliminate the display problem. But since the files can be distributed to other people over the internet, this may not be an option!
Oh, and it only happens when you convert your font to outlines before saving as the PDF file!

I didn't convert the font to outlines, but maybe Signlab does when creating a pdf file

 

[Bobby H]

The Adobe PDF format takes any shortcut opportunity it gets to try to shrink file sizes. This sometimes means it will take certain geometric items, such as rule lines or vertical letters like the lowercase "L" or capital "I", convert them from being rectangle objects with 4 anchor points down to open line stroke objects with 2 anchor points. The line stroke is rendered at the same thickness as the former rectangle object. But it doesn't always render that way on screen. At certain zoom levels the objects can look very strange.

Usually saving a PDF with Adobe Illustrator editing capability left intact will override this strange behavior in PDF.

 

[eahicks]

Always wondered that myself...I got to where I stopped sending proofs in PDF format because of this, and sent as JPG. But then I had the problem of customer calling "if I blow this up real big on my screen it's all jaggedy"....