make 'em grey.

also, zoom in on the pdf, depending on the dithering, they might not be as dark as they look in preview.

thanks Ivo, it seems it is just an image display issue in acrobat. i don't have a printer handy (on break from school) and will be sending these files directly to an online publisher, so i'm a little worried about the quality...i'll be leaving a lot to faith.

did it work out for you? did it look ok when you printed a hard copy i.e. same as illustrator screen quality?

765, it may be a scaling issue. these drawings were created for full format presentations, and now i'm scaling them down for a portfolio, so there are a lot of dense lines that look like single black lines when you scale them down (making them grey just makes them look like a single thick grey line). i gave them a .1 pt stroke, but the line weights don't look 'ok' until i zoom to something like 600% in acrobat.

im assuming there is a threshold of line thickness (or thinness in my case) that acrobat is able to read i.e. .25 pt

When in doubt, go raster.

"did it work out for you? did it look ok when you printed a hard copy i.e. same as illustrator screen quality?"

It worked eventually and it looked ok and sharp on screen after rasterization but to be sure print your hard copies from the vector-based file.

i have had the same problem...when i need to print, i do so from illustrator or indesign and the lineweights come out fine.

havent found a great solution for preserving lineweights when going from illustrator to pdf though.

Print to a Tiff file usually work, although the file size can become very big. But this is a good option if your trying to preserve the lineweight you can see on screen.

You can also try to print to a pdf rather than exporting

Problem with raster/bitmap images is that you can't scale them, change colors, etc.


Acrobat has some issues with display. I'd try transparent. It typically isn't a big deal.