[Tony Dew]

It’s hard to tell without seeing it, but I’d guess that the text is being rasterized during the PDF creation and the resolution is set too low.

A couple of things:

1) Outlined text or text turned to curves will generally print a little ‘heavier’ than still-a-good-old-font text… especially at smaller sizes. However it should still be sharp and crisp as it is vector data and not dependent on resolution. Headlines will be fine; legal fine print not so much.

2) I forget what number two was going to be… Uhm… Oh! The text will still look sharp in Illustrator, because Illustrator is displaying native art objects. But when you convert to PDF, the text can get beat up. Make sure that your ‘Document Raster Effects Settings’ and, if applicable, your transparency flattening settings are approriate for your output.

Good luck!

[Tony Dew]

To create a ‘place holder’ in PS, first create a box in Illustrator that is the size you want. Then, paint it white or whatever, but have no stroke. Select all the points of the box and copy to the clipboard.

Switch to PS and create a new file. The dialog box should come up with the size of the ‘place holder’ box in clipboard. Set your resolution and you done!

Hope that makes sense and that I understood your question right.

As for JPEG compression, even ‘maximum’ will provide a significant decrease in filesize. At the ‘maximum’ level the artifacts created by the ‘lossy’ JPEG compression will be little to none.