Sometimes when you output to PDF, some letters seem to become hugely fatter than the rest.
The capital "I" (eye) and lower case "l" (el) are worst affected, as is the lower case "ı" from the Turkish alphabet. As far as I can work out, it's because Adobe Acrobat Reader (and even Acrobat Pro) thinks these characters are actually little borders. It (usually) only happens if you have converted these fonts to shapes (i.e. "create outlines" in Illustrator).
Crap solution:
In Acrobat there is a preference called "enhance thin lines". God knows why it exists. This little feature seems to be what adds weight to the characters in question. Now, you can go into preferences and turn this off, and it should alleviate the problem.
But if you send the PDF to someone else, more likely than not they will still have it turned on. When they see the crappy looking letters they will probably assume you are an incompetent typesetter / artist. Thanks, Adobe.
The first thing you could try is not "outlining" your text - leaving it rendered as a font, rather than shapes, means Adobe's stupid little preference shouldn't mess about with it. You will need to embed your font if you do this. Of course you might not want your text as text (to stop it being changed so easily perhaps), or you might need to edit the text (I recently had to delete a bunch of dots from "i" characters because the font didn't contain the "ı"). There is a way!
Excellent solution:
If you have Illustrator, the solution would be to add a point to the vertical strokes of all the lowercase "i" & "l". It's a pain & can be time consuming but it works.It sure does! The genius who found this solution didn't leave a name, but we salute you!
Hope this helps.
In case you don't quite get it, here's a little visual guide:
I hope this helps anyone who has been tearing their hair out, as I was.
Not our usual type of reading material, but there we go...
PS conversely (and somewhat perversely?) if you are using CorelDRAW! rather than Illustrator, almost the exact opposite can occur. If you export to PDF with fonts intact, you may witness this issue. If however you "convert to curves" before exporting, all should be well. Odd, eh?
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