Why are some pages in my PDF coming out bold?

Question

When I run my LaTeX document through pdflatex, some of the pages (the ones where figures appear) have all the text bolded. Why, and what can I do to make it stop?

Answer 1

I guess you are using Adobe Reader? If you use transparency in your illustrations, it seems that Adobe Reader renders text incorrectly (something like the wrong gamma correction in anti-aliasing perhaps), which makes the text look a bit too bold. It should look OK if you use other PDF readers, and it should also look OK when printed from Adobe Reader.

A simple solution is to avoid using transparency whenever possible.

You can remove transparency from existing PNG images using graphics editors like GIMP or Photoshop, or with a command-line program like ImageMagick. With ImageMagick, the command convert image.png -background white -alpha off image_new.png will remove the transparency (from http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/masking/#alpha_remove).

Answer 2

This may just be your PDF viewer that acting strangely. Even though PDF files are supposedly seen as you would get them, there are some differences in how it looks on screen and on paper.

Back when I was using Windows with Adobe Reader, sometimes scrolling past a page and then back it again would get rid of this "boldness".

Answer 3

I was also wrestling with the "PDF printing bold" issue, and had some success when I flattened transparency. But even when I followed all of the "rules" (images on layer below text, all transparent effects rasterized), the text in my color proofs was still getting inexplicably bold, or more accurately: the text looked like it was printed twice- registration was a bit off.

I'm using InDesign 5.5 to make a 20+ page newsletter (mixed images & text). Tried all kinds of InDesign settings, all kinds of Acrobat settings, but the one that ended up doing the trick was buried in the printer's properties dialogue: Simulate Overprinting. When I turned that on, my text came out exactly as intended, and there was much rejoicing.

There seems to be an odd interaction between Acrobat's print dialogue and some printer settings. For example, you'll get weirdness if you try to print "booklet" via the printer's applet (mine's a Canon C7065), but if you use Adobe Acrobat's "booklet" feature, all is well. For my newsletter to print correctly, I have to set a number of items in both dialogues, and in my case the overprint setting was a big find.

Hope that helps!

Mike Craghead

Answer 4

I had such an issue when mixing pages with images with and without transparency. If you experience this in Acrobat Reader (almost all including recent versions), but not other PDF readers, the following code in the preamble might do the trick and enforce the same RGB rendering for all pages (for xelatex):

\AddToShipoutPicture{%
\makeatletter%
\special{pdf: put @thispage <</Group << /S /Transparency /I true /CS /DeviceRGB>> >>}%
\makeatother%
}

For pdflatex use:

\pdfpageattr {/Group << /S /Transparency /I true /CS /DeviceRGB>>} 

(Answer reposted from Text appearing bold on some pages with images, as the other thread was marked duplicate, but I think it applies here, too.)

Answer 5

To prime the answer pump with something else I observed: It appears to be a bug in pdflatex stemming from the handling of images with transparency; converting the PNG images to PDFs seems to fix the problem whenever it crops up.

Answer 6

I had this problem today and I was quite desperate.

Only way to fix this is to break your text into separate paragraphs near the areas where this issue happens.

Apparently Photoshop exports some texts twice, so you get the same text on top of itself which makes it look bold in the previews.

Sometimes it helps to just change the tracking if it's a single word. Most often it doesn't.