The blocky i

Adobe Reader / Acrobat has a bug that seems to peek its head up every time I forget about it. The hardest part is describing the problem.

Why does the “i” or “l” display thick in my pdf?

Why is the rectangle in my adobe reader file thicker than the rest?

Some letters look out of sync with the others and extra blocky…

The text doesn’t look all that well lined up…for instance the capital letter “I” seems bigger than the other letters…

The font was converted to outlines, shouldn’t that fix the uneven lettering?

Why’s my “I” fat, bro?

Whatever you call it

Your actual artwork or text is not wrong. It will not print with the blocky characteristics as you see in your Adobe Reader. There’s a problem with the glasses your computer is wearing to view your art.

A visual example of the ‘thick’ ‘i’

Below is how Adobe’s preview program renders the art. Roll-over the image to see how the pdf should look.

Adobe’s definition is, “Enhance Thin Lines: When selected, clarifies thin lines in the display to make them more visible.” Uncheck that and you’re good to go. I’ve never had a circumstance where having this unchecked has caused any problems….it should be known that I’m not in the thin-line line of work, as it were.

Alternative solutions

1. Avoid Reader. Since this is a preference option in Adobe Reader, printing out the pdf will avoid the bug and render the lines correctly.
2. Zoom, zoom. The said blockyness renders correctly when zoomed in to at least 800% in Reader.
3. Don’t convert your fonts to outlines; therefore the art is rendered from the local font file, not the actual points on the rectangle.
4. Add vector points to the rectangles, lengthwise, so there are 6 total instead of 4. (Via Armin Vit’s thorough open letter to Adobe in 2008)….the question is seemingly, still unanswered.

These have proved as simple solutions for clients and when you want to avoid a click this then this then that conversation.

There are more discussions on the adobe forums.