Disable subpixel antialiasing of text in PDFs

Max Published at Dev

Max

I'm generating PDFs. One font in particular - Helvetica Neue Light - renders particularly poorly when the PDF is viewed on a Mac, thanks to subpixel antialiasing.

I want to disable subpixel antialiasing in the PDF. (Not in the PDF viewer.) The equivalent in CSS is -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased.

Bad:

Good:

Is this possible?

David van Driessche

No.

Somewhat longer answer? :)

Antialiasing is a device specific optimisation (anti-aliasing would be done differently on a printing device (if at all), on a monitor and on an LCD monitor for example).

PDF is by design a device agnostic file format and as such it stays away (tries to stay away) from device specific constructs. Anti-aliasing settings are by definition preferences from the viewer and cannot be influenced by the PDF file itself.

The result you're showing is quite different indeed - you're sure the font is accurately embedded in the PDF file (and is of decent quality)? It would also be worthwhile to look a bit further at the "On a Mac" statement. I'm assuming you're saying it looks bad in "Preview" on a Mac; in that case it's be interesting to see how it performs in Preview versus Adobe Acrobat. That could tell you whether it's a font issue or an application issue.

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edited at2021-04-2

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Disable subpixel antialiasing of text in PDFs

Disable subpixel antialiasing of text in PDFs

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