exported pdf's look bad on PC's

As far as I know, the anti aliasing apply to display on your machine.
Not to the font stored in the document.
As the font (in fact a subset containing only the used characters) is embedded in the PDF, the only available explanation seams to be that there is an oddity in the application used to render the PDF on the PC. Some days ago, an asker had problems with Pages generated PDFs which disapeared when he upgraded its Adobe Reader for PC. He was just using an old version.

Yvan KOENIG (VALLAURIS, France) 31 août 2010 18:18:01

It could be that you used the dFont version of Helvetica, which is used by OSX as a system font.

Check in *Font Book*.

Helvetica is not the most legible screen font. I use Lucida Sans for my on screen user material as it is more open and legible. It is also available on Windows.

Either way I'd experiment with a document containing samples of several different candidate fonts and see which works best cross platform, as you'd do for any project.

Peter

There is a paid app for Mac called PDF Shrink that does a great job converting PDFs for viewing/printing on all types of computers:
http://apagoinc.com/pdfshrink

I eventually went for this after trying a range of PDF settings in OS X.

It could be that you used the dFont version of Helvetica, which is used by OSX as a system font.

As Yvan writes, the user needs to know how the PDF consumer is configured. Adobe (Acrobat) Reader can be configured to different forms and degrees of anti-aliasing / grayscaling. In order for the font data embedded by the PDF creator to look the same, the PDF consumers should be configured the same. PDF is not paper - there is no application inserted between the viewable paper graphic and the audience whereas with there is an application inserted that turns the imageable data into a viewable raster graphic.

/hh

Forget to add that the Document Properties > Fonts panel in Adobe Acrobat does not help a whole lot in identifying the original font model (Type 1, CFF Compact Font Format, TrueType) and the original composition model (SFNT simple, SFNT with Apple supplements, SFNT with Microsoft supplements). Also, the font data may be split into several embedded fonts (e.g. five words set in Apple Hoefler may end up as two embedded fonts in PDF). It's nothing like what happens when an ICC profile is embedded intact in PDF 1.3 and higher - neither the tag-based font file format nor the input of character information is conserved intact.

/hh

I use legible fonts that I know are common to MS Office on both platforms. Installing the freely available, _Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.1.6_ (Aug 2010), from Mactopia, side-steps purchasing Office for Mac, but does provide these common fonts to Pages.

Microsoft has a typography font site that allows you to select a given MS application and see a WYSIWIG screen view of the fonts that application uses/contains. This includes any MS Office suite for Windows and Mac. Google the following string: Microsoft typography fonts .

Your manual may be more legible when opened with 125% magnification, as the magnification process appears to do more for font rendering than just enlargement. Reader also has a tendency to over blacken text, and if that is still a problem in the observed manual, you may need to counter this in Pages by moving from default text coloration to a preferred darker grey scale in your style.

Unfortunately, Pages 4.04 does not provide much PDF export control for reader settings (Apple!), such as default magnification. OpenOffice Writer 3.2.1 does offer more versatile PDF export controls that may improve the default manual viewing experience, but the Pages to OOo Writer conversion for the questionable PDF export benefit may not reflect the best use of time and expense.