So I’m doing this book cover for someone and I made the file in Adobe Illustrator and saved it as a pdf according to the settings they require (Press Quality). Before I did that I converted all the text to shapes. Now they’re saying that the text is coming up as 72pdi and saying it has to be at least 300dpi for print… but I don’t understand, because it’s all vector shapes. It shouldn’t HAVE a dpi, right? I tried opening it in Adobe reader and zoomed it in 1600x and it still looks perfectly smooth.
ARG. I don’t know how to fix this. Besides exporting the whole thing as a tif or something and then bringing it back in as a big layer and sending them that. But that seems so lame.
Just the Text? That probably just means they don’t have the font, especially if it looks fine to you when zoomed. Check the box in the export that says “embed fonts” or something like that.
Since the text was converted to paths, that can’t be it.
Opal, do you know what they’re opening the PDF in? If they’re opening it in Photoshop or something, it may be defaulting to 72dpi, and they should be able to fix that at their end.
I’ll send you an email - if you can email me back the pdf I’ll see if it looks okay on my system.
I’ve seen something similar to this in Illustrator.
I once set something up that was supposed to be 2 ft. x 3 ft. but accidentally set the canvas size to 2" x 3".
This should’ve been fine, but when I converted the text to outlines, Illustrator made the outlines jagged. It was still vector, but instead of straight lines, it actually made it look like pixels.
When it was stretched to the correct size, it looked like a low-res .jpg file had been used, but in the wireframe mode, you could see the vector outlines. This only happens when you convert the text to outlines. When I undid that, I was able to correct the size and everything was fine.
Make sure you’re using the correct canvas size. If you’re designing a billboard, don’t work in a 8 1/2" x 11" document.
I’m sure there’s some way to fix this, but I don’t use Illustrator often enough to try to figure it out.
Look at your document in illustrator, with the text converted to outlines and zoom in really close and you should see the effect I’m talking about.