Mac Forum / Applications / Word / January 2006

Text should be OK. Word usually sends the low resolution preview of eps
images to PDF by mistake.
You can work round that by saving as postscript in the print dialog and
then opening and saving again as PDF using Apple's own Preview.app

If you have raster images in your document, you may be getting lower
quality than you expect because of your colorsync settings (in the
print dialog menu on the third row underneath "copies and pages".)

The menu dialogs are different in Panther and Tiger. If you need more
help, tell us more about what is wrong with the PDF, your Mac OS X
version, and your Word version.

I've noticed similar problems with all line drawings imported into Word
2004 in any format, both in PDFs generated by OS X and by Acrobat. The
line edges have tiny bumps, making the lines look fuzzy to the naked
eye. The same thing happens when you simply print to a laser printer.

You can see the bumps easily with a magnifier. It's most obvious in
charts and such, with their straight lines. It seems to be some kind of
mishandling on importing. Acrobat's preflight function says something
about improper bit depth (4 bit).

This does not happen with OS 9 versions of Word, and it does not happen
in the Windows versions. It does not happen in other OS X apps. I have
not been able to find any way around it. It appears that Word 2004 is
simply useless for anything with line drawings that need to be of high
quality.

Aaron