Indesign making bad pdfs?

[thistlefisher]

I'm not sure if this should go here or in the Acrobat forum, so sorry if it's in the wrong place!

Problem is last week for no reason I could see, any pdfs exported from Indesign that had any Illustrator files in them, the illustrator part was coming out bad quality. The edges were noisey and not crisp. I figured it was something to do with the file I was working on and the specific settings, but going back to previous files and reexporting them using a variety of the presets turned out the same. I then moved my new indd doc to a newer computer and it exported fine.

So then, figuring it was something in either Indesign or Acrobats settings, I reset the preferences to default on Indesign. No joy.

Does anyone have any idea what the problem could be? I'm trying to avoid a reinstall if possible.

Thanks!

[Lukas Engqvist]

If links are not up to date or missing you will get what you are describing.
Would also happen with wrong PDF settings.

[thistlefisher]

Hi Lukas, thanks for replying.

All the links are fine as far as I can tell. I even preflighted and packaged everything just to make sure, and tried to make a pdf from the folder packaged version.

I'm using all the preset pdf options (high quality, press quality, smallest file size), and none are working.

[eugenetyson]

Give us some screen shots, or somewhere we can download your pdf, it would be helpful to diagnose the problem.

[thistlefisher]

Ok interesting development..
So I was taking screenshots of the "bad" and "good" pdfs and had moved them both onto good compy to upload to here, and the bad pdf looks fine on good compy!

So there's something wrong with either the computer or acrobat, because the file/indesign is apparently fine.
Any ideas?

[eugenetyson]

How does it look when printed?

[Lukas Engqvist]

what are your display preferences.
in particular smooth text, smooth line art, smooth images.
(note that smooting line art may give thin white lines on pictures that are flattened)

[thistlefisher]

It looks fine when printed, although there were a couple places something went weird with a transparency, the curves and edges were sharp and correct.

Experimenting with the acrobat settings I think it might have been because the resolution was set to custom 130dpi instead of 96. I don't remember doing this, I don't even know if it's the default. I set it back to the system setting display at 96. Also, "smooth line art" was unchecked and I rechecked it.

Is there any way to reset all the acrobat preferences to default?

[thistlefisher]

Oh! you saying that about the "smooth line art" just reminded me I did change that setting a few projects ago because of the white lines. Doh!

Should the dpi be set to system or something else?

[Lukas Engqvist]

It used to be in the "good old days" that mac displays were 72 ppi so that one pixel = 1 point making maths so simple. A 10 pt text was 10 pixels high etc.
since then we are getting monitors at all resolutions and we can not guarantee that if I view my work ar 100% I can take a tape measure to see how large something is.

The dpi setting does that (provided you set it up right) so that if you view at 100% you see the art at 100%. So it is really only important if the zoom percentage is important to you.