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Text added to pdf appears blurry


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I did a bit of digging to see if this has been addressed by someone else, but I'm not finding anything.

Whenever I add text to a pdf, text specifically, it looks fine while editing. However, the moment I back out, any text I put into my document comes out super blurry. The pdf itself looks fine in both editing mode and the final pdf export, but the text I've added comes out blurry, as you can see below in red and blue. Drawings, shapes, and all other elements come out fine.

Is there a reason this is like this? Is this a known issue? Is there a fix? Any help would be appreciated, as I'd like my college homework to be as professional as possible in appearance. 

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@gazumped Thanks for getting back to me, and apologies on taking so long to get back to you.

It does not appear that display quality is a factor in the resulting annotation fuzziness. I've tried annotation on a separate laptop with identical results. 

While I may not understand what you mean by it being "usually down to display quality," I've also found no difference between using Evernote on my 1920x1200 monitor and my 1920x1080 monitor. 

Furthermore, I've found that attempting to view the edited pdf appears blurry on external website previews, as well as the Evernote preview on my phone. The pdf looks fine, but the added annotation text is still blurry.

If there's anymore information I can provide to solving this solution, I am happy to oblige. 

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@PinkElephant Sure thing! Just had to scrub some personal details, but this is a perfect example with plenty of scenarios of blurry text.

Because of the blurry nature, I'm limited to the second smallest line size, or I risk the text being completely illegible, especially noticeable on the green T's on the second page. I do find it odd that the blue ~q, ~r, 1, and 2 aren't blurry for whatever reason, but the other entries in that row are. I use this as evidence that the text shadow is not necessarily causal or remedial to the issue.

(Also, even if removing text shadow was a solution to this issue, I'd really rather not have to remove the text shadow from every text entry I make, as that would become QUITE tedious)

Evernote-Example-Blurry-Text.pdf

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  • Evernote Expert

I agree that typed text is 'soft' ie not as crisp as the original PDF text but that freehand sketching is crisp.

However, I would not describe the typed text a blurry - which to me implies well out of focus. Everything is easy to read and understand. So the annotations serve the purpose.

That said, I do not, and would not, use the built in Evernote annotation tools.  I far prefer to annotate in an external program designed for the task.  I use Adobe Acrobat Pro and would also consider FoxIt Pro. Right click Open, add annotations in Acrobat/FoxIt and save.

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  • Level 5

Very simple: The annotated text comes in a type of font comprising pixels. You can see it pretty clearly when you zoom in.

The original text of the pdf is a vector font, which scales the text edges independently from the font size or zoom factor.

These are 2 different font technologies. The pixelfonts were there at the beginning of IT. The vector fonts like True Type came later.

This is a fundamental issue, no fix short of changing the whole text annotation tool possible.

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While I find this outcome frustrating, I suppose I understand the circumstances I'm presented with, and hope that this is a feature the devs might consider improving upon in the future.

On a side note, I still don't entirely understand why the blue ~q, ~r, 1, and 2 on page 2 are specifically crisp, while the others are not. Could this ultimately come down a luck of the text's positioning? Is there something else at play here that I'm missing?

image.png.841a76d0c0d58976a4090573bc289d1e.png

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  • Level 5

No idea. With pixelated fonts, if you hit by accident exactly one of the design sizes, the pixels are less visible. Maybe this is the case here - often a very small change leads to a smooth result.

The annotation tool was practically taken from the Skitch app. This app was AFAIK not developed by EN - they bought it several years ago and halfheartedly integrated it with EN. I am not sure whether one of the original devs is even still with the company. Old code, not really improved over the years.

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