When convert to pdf, display bad- suggestions?

[mejohnso]

Hello-
I am working on a series of maps that will be primarily viewed on computers. There will be a very limited printing, so I have initially been saving as press quality. When I convert my .indd to pdf (having tried various presets), the text is blurry until you zoom in really close. There are other minor issues (lines look like they overlap until you zoom in, etc). I assume this is a setting issue, but the various setting changes have not changed the problem at all. Any suggestions?
Thanks!

 

[Eggles]

What are the dimensions of the maps? If they are quite large then to get the whole map to fit on a screen, then individual components are going to be very small, so that it is probably almost inevitable you will have to zoom in close to read it. At least, that's my experience with online maps.

 

[mejohnso]

Thanks for the post- the dimensions are: 612 pt x 792 pt. I can make them look a little better by increasing resolution in page display in adobe acrobat, but it still does not look very good. Am I just dealing with too much information on the maps to look good at full page view?

Thanks!

 

[Eggles]

So the maps are 8.5" x 11"? (I use metrics, so I'm not all that familiar with measuring in pts for dimensions). I don't think you can't view something of that size on a normal monitor at 100% and still expect to be able to read text that could be down as low as 6, 7, 8, pts? So what size is the text?

 

[mejohnso]

The smallest font is 10 pt, most is larger. It doesn't need to be legible, just not sloppy looking, if that makes sense.

Thanks for your help!

 

[Eggles]

I think text size at 10 pts in a full page PDF should be legible on screen at 100%.

So the problem appears to be in viewing the PDF in Acrobat. What version are you using? The older versions (5 or less?) had a setting called 'smoothing' under Edit>Preferences>General>Display - all boxes need to be checked (they weren't by default). A similar setting exists in Reader 7 under Preferenes>Page Display, so perhaps it's just a display issue and nothing more serious?

 

[jmgalvin]

Is the text actually text or is it part of the original map in an image format?

If the text is not actually text – meaning you can edit the type directly in indesign – but part of an image like a tiff or jpg, its quality can be degraded when converted to pdf.

Let’s say you have a bunch of 600 dpi tiffs of your maps (600 being about the minimum for nice clear text in a raster format) and you create a press quality pdf. That will change the images to 300 dpi and text will become fuzzy – especially apparent at small font sizes. The press quality retains true text at 2400 dpi (a big difference)

You can create a pdf at 600 dpi for images. Just pick the press setting pdf export, go to Compression, change downsampling to 600 and hit the Save Preset box – with a new name. See if the text is clearer. The big problem here is that the pdf will be huge if each page is a 600 dpi image.


Using OSX 10.3.9 on a G4

 

[mejohnso]

Thank you for the explanation. The text is part of the image. I will definitely have to evaluate the trade off on resolution vs size. 100 pages at 600 dpi would definitely get large.

Thanks for the help!

 

[Eggles]

Good point jm. I assumed the text was being added to the maps within ID.