Has anyone else noticed that the text quality is not optimal when compiling to a PDF? I’m not sure I understand why this would be a problem. You can export to PDF on other softwares without issue. It’s quite frustrating as it means I have to export it to another application to get a professional-looking PDF. As far as I’ve seen, there is no fix to this, and I’ve come across others on the internet with the same issue.
Welcome to Scrivener and the forum…
I’ve been compiling to PDF (direct or via the LaTeX template) for years and never noticed an issue with text or images. I did a quick search of this forum and didn’t find many past posts about this, but my query string may have been inadequate. Might be something there, but I don’t recall.
Specifically what are the “text quality” issues you notice? And what would be “optimal” in your view? What app are you using to display the PDF that you produce? Using Windows or macOS version of Scrivener, and is Scrivener and the operating system up to date? Would be useful for others to see if you would post a problematic PDF (full or a few pages and not a screen shot copy) that demonstrates the non-optimal result?
We certainly do not intend Scrivener to be used for professional quality PDF output, just to be clear. It’s mainly a writing program, and its compile features should be better thought of as tools to help you get the material in a suitable production environment more efficiently—whatever that might be.
On both systems we just use off-the-shelf PDF generators, neither are meant to replace anything of quality by their makers, and both are largely beyond our control.
On Windows this is particularly true as the problems go beyond poor font kerning and hinting, and into a fundamental lack of features for putting together a finalised PDF (hyphenation, cross-references you can click on, table of contents for the sidebar, CMYK, etc.).
For myself, as above, it means getting the text into a form that LaTeX can use to generate a PDF. I can achieve this with a single click from compile, thanks to LaTeX being a tool that can be easily automated. But that is just one way of going.
Would be useful for others to see if you would post a problematic PDF (full or a few pages and not a screen shot copy) that demonstrates the non-optimal result?
It depends on one’s configuration (and I do believe things have improved a little at the very small scale, font rendering isn’t this bad any more, but it’s still not great), but I once posted a three-way comparison of Windows Scrivener PDF vs LaTeX vs WebKit, to show how in many ways, it would even be better to use a web browser to print than Scrivener (the image is better viewed full size in its own tab):
a) LaTeX
b) Scrivener-Win
c) Vivaldi (Chromium)
I’ve moved this to the Windows subsection because, while I’d never use the Mac text engine for anything beyond internal memos, documentation and the like, it’s not anything like the above.
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