Substandard Text in PDF from InDesign 6.1

[David_Lampel@adobeforums.com]

Problem:
Text in PDF made from InDesign publication (only) is poor quality.

Discussion:
I recently upgraded from PageMaker 6.52 to InDesign CS, and from Acrobat 4.1 to Acrobat 6.1. I have recently discovered that the paragraph text in my PDFs generated from InDesign is sub-standard--meaning, when printed on a color laser printer at 1200 dpi, the black text looks as if it is being printed at 300 dpi or worse. Instead of clean sharp edges, the edges are poorly defined--not necessarily "jaggy" or pixelated, but just rough, as if printed at a too-low resolution. The text looks perfect on-screen--even greatly magnified--but is unaaceptable on the printed page.

The reason I am posting this at the InDesign forum, instead of Acrobat, is that through exhaustive testing I have reduced down the possible culprit to InDesign. I have tested many combinations of PM, InD, MSWord, Acrobat 4 through 6, printing the files by Acrobat 6.1 and Reader 5.0. I won't bore everyone with the details (will supply on request), but the bottom line is that with all things being equal, publications created in InDesign, then either "printed" to the Acrobat driver or "exported to PDF," when printed to a color laser printer at 1200+ dpi, show color graphics perfectly OK, but black paragraph text is "crude," as if printed at 300 dpi or worse. Using PageMaker and earlier versions of Acrobat, this never occurred before.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Guy_Smiley@adobeforums.com]

Make sure your text is RGB black and not CMYK black.

[David_Lampel@adobeforums.com]

Guy,

May your tribe increase! That was indeed the problem. Thank you for your help.

Dave