[pastusza]

So, I have heard a complaint from a number of graphic artists about Apple's PDF renderer built in to OS X, and how it is pretty inferior. I never really gave it much thought until today.

I design my own pages for stamp collecting using an open source desktop publishing program called Scribus. The final product is exported to PDF using an embedded PDF renderer in the app. I then went and fired up preview and printed a page onto 67 lb. cover stock from Staples. I felt the pages looked rather dull, and I at first thought that perhaps the paper had absorbed some of the ink and "fuzzed out" the text. Because the results didn't look nearly as good as they did on the color laser at work.

So, then, for yucks, I loaded the same file in Adobe Acrobat Pro 10. I printed a page out, and it was like night and day! The text was crisper and clearer. It looked as good as the laser output from work.

Has anyone else seen these kinds of results?

Technical for the nozy:

Printer: Epson Artisan 835
Font: Liberation Sans
Computer: Apple Mac mini running Mountain Lion, patched through today.

[besson3c]

Part of this might be some of the PDF compression settings used by OS X and their defaults?

[turtle777]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

Part of this might be some of the PDF compression settings used by OS X and their defaults?

But why would that matter when printing a file ?

It seems like Acrobat prints better than OS X. If that's the case, it's a real problem.

-t

[pastusza]

Well, Adobe did invent PDF. It stand to reason they would know the ins and outs of making it print better.