Export PDF's with better quality, to be opened on PC

"Print to" pdf is not illogical at all, that is in fact what it is doing, with the file being captured before it reaches the printer. It is one of the better features of OS X that pdf is ubiquitous and therefore everything can be printed quickly to pdfs for later reading, complete with links in most cases.

I have not been able to reproduce the problems of PDFs opened in Acrobat but I do not use PCs for this kind of work. Others have reported the problem but without enough specifics to narrow down the issue other than Acrobat does not render the OS X pdfs accurately.

Acrobat Pro has other problems as well so it is hard to know where to shift the blame. The PDF format was created by Adobe so I presume they should be able to define how it is formed and read.

I suggest you run your own tests, as I would, clearly labelling them as you go both in the file name and the contents. Look for whether fonts are being rendered correctly (perhaps being mismatched across systems) and what is happening to images and particularly instances of transparency in the document. Test what the end resolution is for the images in the document.

Then let us know what you have discovered.

Peter

Sorry I thought you were a native English speaker. Swedish/Danish/Norwegian?

Hard to determine anything from photographs of the screen with all the interference patterns.

You take a screensnap by holding down command shift 4 and dragging over the area you want. The screensnap is saved to the Desktop as a .png file.

On a PC you hit the Print Screen key on the keyboard.

I'll translate the "chinese" 🙂

You need to test the problem:

1. Create files with both text and images.

2. Label the files clearly as to what they are e.g. "Times Roman Images 300dpi Pages 5.5.2" etc

3. Also put that label in the document itself so you know what you are looking at and exactly what settings you used.

4. You appear to have used Times Roman. I suspect, but can't be sure, that what is happening is the Mac version is sharp and clear, but it is not being embedded or used by the PC which is substituting the Windows version.

5. Acrobat has a different and in my opinion inferior method of anti-aliasing fonts. Anti-aliasing is a method of smoothing fonts on screen by adding grey pixels in the curves and angles.

Sorry I can't do more but you have the files and I presume the recipients with the problems.

Peter

I think it is a waste of time to try to use Pages for university papers to be read by people using Windows machines. It just isn't an adequate substitute for Word for Mac or Open/LibreOffice for such purposes.

You are definitely not alone, many people have complained of poor on-screen appearance of Pages' PDF files on PCs.

Not something I can do a lot about, as I haven't encountered the problem myself and know from long experience that trying to fix PC problems from a Mac is an exercise in futility. Things can look naturally bad or distorted under Windows (all the many flavours and installations) and it takes a lot of toing and froing to even get a vague idea of what does what, and there is little comprehension or help by PC users who fix their problems by using MsOffice and nothing else.

Peter

Bean is pleasant.

LibreOffice is capable but a bit of a pain to use.

Both are free.

Then there are the commercial alternatives NisusWriter and Mellel.

Peter

Am I surprised that a PC user misreports a problem? No.

Am I surprised that things can look wildly different under Windows? No?

Can you satisfy all PC users when they themselves don't know what is good or not? No.

Do I bother trying? …guess 😉

Peter

To achieve better quality PDF exports of Pages documents, use Pages' print dialog to save it as a PostScript file. Then open the PS file with Preview, and use that to export the document as PDF. Preview has a specific feature for this, do not save via printing.

Documents converted this way appear fine on Windows PCs but are larger by file size for some reason.

I hope this helps.