I'm authoring a textbook (e-book) in Microsoft Word and we're publishing as an Acrobat PDF. The problem I'm having is that, while the fonts/typography look fine in MS Word, when I build the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro, the fonts are fuzzy/grainy and at times, just downright distorted.
I've tried playing with various Acrobat options -- DPI, downsampling, optimizing for high-quality print, etc -- but nothing seems to help. I've verified that fonts are embedded in the PDF and so forth. I've tried using different fonts. Same problem: fuzzy, grainy, and distorted.
My suspicion is simply that Adobe doesn't display TrueType (let alone ClearType) fonts properly, possibly in order to convince users to switch to OpenType or PostScript fonts, thus pushing the Adobe product line. I wonder if it's even possibly to produce beautiful on-screen typography such as this...
http://www.adobe.com/education/pdf/type_primer.pdf
...without paying thousands of dollars for Adobe InDesign and a professional font library.
Any ideas/suggestions much appreciated...!