Product

Platform

Operating system

Error

Symptoms

When outlining fonts, text can appear fatter or less clean at low resolution. This can also happen when text gets trapped.

Cause

However, when outlining or trapping fonts, text can appear fatter or less clean at low resolution.

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There is a font characteristic called "hinting" that allows text to render nicely to low resolutions (such as on-screen) or at small sizes. By converting a font to outlines, you lose this "hinting" (the font no longer really exists). This also happens with trapped text because the traps are constructed as vectors, not as text objects, so there is also no hinting information.

Solution

Normally, the loss of hinting is only a problem at low resolutions. If you output to high resolution, the lack of hinting should not be noticable. You can also turn on "anti-aliasing" in the Render tab of a proofing process plan (try setting it to 4 initially). This effectively increases the resolution at which the file gets ripped and results in sharping-looking, less fat text. Note: shades=256 must be used for this to work.

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To minimize the appearance of "fattness" in Acrobat, ensure that "smooth line art" is turned on (accessible from Preferences\General\Smoothing in Acrobat 6).

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Prinergy 2.2 also allows exporting of PDF without traps, which allows you to proof the resulting PDF and not have the traps effect the appearance of text.

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Note that there are some extreme cases where a page contains very small text (where hinting is necessary to render the text nicely at that size). In some of these cases, the loss of hinting information can cause fatter text, even at high resolution output.

Permanent fix:

See also

Keywords

font, output, proofing, trapping, vector output

Technical contact(s)

James Bredenhof

Submitted by

James Bredenhof

Date submitted

26 Nov 2002