Legal Writing

Fuzzy Type in PDFs

I notice that quite a few law firms publish PDFs in which the type isn’t rendered properly. Instead, it looks bold and rough unless you zoom in on it, in which case it looks just fine.

Consider the following block of type. The left side is from a PDF published by a Great Big Law Firm; the right side is from the Word document that was the source of the PDF.

The type in the Word document looks fine; the type in the PDF is much heavier and less distinct.

In this case, the problem is that the PDF was saved in the wrong format. But that’s not especially important, as there are a number of problems that can prevent PDFs from looking as good as they should.

No, what’s important is that no one caught the error. They just distributed it to their ?friends and clients? with clunky type.

That’s a mistake. It sure is. It’s on the order of showing up for an important meeting with a potential client with your sweats on.

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And why do so many Great Big Firms make such errors again, and again, and again? Because they’re blind to good looks.

The attorneys run the show, and they could give a hoot about type or graphics. Those things weren’t mentioned in law school, so it’s hard to see how they could be important at all.

And the marketing department? At some firms, no one in marketing has any training in publishing at all. And it really doesn’t matter. If the attorneys don’t care about the quality of what the firm publishes, why should they?

Prospective clients do care. They care about most everything: from your dress to your speech to your gate to the quality (both in terms of content and appearance) of your firm’s publications, especially if your firm claims to be a master of modern technology.

If a firm employed people who knew how to use computers to produce publications, it would never publish a PDF that looks like this.

So what’s wrong with that PDF? Nothing, except this: it’s the PDF that was sent to the printer. It contains crop marks, and register marks, and slugs — the sort of things that readers should never see. It’s a production PDF; it’s not meant for distribution.

Have you ever seen a copy of Time magazine with crop marks, and register marks, and slugs? Of course not. That’s produced by a publishing company, not a Great Big Law Firm, and its people not only know how to produce publications, they take pride in their work.

Some Great Big Law Firms could use such people. They sure could.

Full post as published by Set in Style on January 26, 2010 (boomark / email).