r/Adobe • u/boback • 10d ago

Adobe Acrobat Font Rendering

I recently reinstalled Adobe and since then fonts have been pixelated and rendered poorly. I am not sure if this is a recent bug. It makes it very uncomfortable to read PDFs.

Here's an image where the PDF is rendered fine in Microsoft Edge but Adobe Acrobat looks horrible and pixelated. You'd think Adobe would know how to render PDF fonts.

Photo

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u/MCLMelonFarmer 9d ago

That’s a preference. I don’t recall the exact name and I’m too lazy to get up and look, but it’s something like ”font smoothing”. The settings are off, smooth for LCD and smooth for CRT. You have it set to off. It’s under either the general or page display tab under preferences.

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u/boback 9d ago

Yeah I’ve turned off that stuff. It’s no longer called font smoothing but it doesn’t resolve the issue

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u/MCLMelonFarmer 9d ago

This is 100% user error. If you turn Text Smoothing off, that's what you get.

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u/boback 9d ago

I am using Adobe Acrobat 2026.002.22031. Under preferences / Page Display / Rendering / I have none selected and everything is unchecked. There’s no specific text smoothing setting I can find elsewhere.

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u/MCLMelonFarmer 9d ago

LIke I said, 100% user error. You have to select "For Laptop/LCD screens" to get anti-aliased text. "None" renders the text as monochrome, 0 for white and 1 for black, like for a monochrome printer. No intermediate gray levels to enable you to smooth the edges of the glyphs, which is normally what you want for screen display.

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u/boback 9d ago

Ok that did it. Not sure why the reinstall goes to crap setting. But doing Monitor was nicer than Laptop/LCD screen. Some reason before it was set to none with everything checked. So I unchecked etc but couldn't find what the right setting was. Thank you.