Why does my Adobe Reader render PDFs so poorly?

Question

I'm using Adobe Reader 9.4.3 on Windows 7. Everything is pretty much as is out of the box. I have not done anything special with fonts or smoothing. In Linux and even Windows/Chrome things look like this:

In Adobe/Windows they look like this:

Solution 1

you should update to the current version of adobe reader for windows 7, which is version 10.1.2.

Solution 2

Go to Edit>Preferences>Page Display>Rendering>, from the smooth text drop-down option choose "For laptop/LCD screens". Your problem must be solved.

Solution 3

Font smoothing must be off. Goto Edit > Prefrences > Smooth Text > Select a smoothing method

Just did it, my works fine now

Comments

[Dzung Nguyen]

you can give another pdf reader like foxit reader, sumatra a try. They are better and faster than abode for reading purpose.

[deltanovember]

A lot of my readers would be using V9. I would like to know how to fix things if they experience the same issue for space. It is still a relatively recent piece of software I don't see why it should have problems rendering a plain vanilla PDF.

[obsd]

if you need to use version 9, then update to version 9.5 through the link provided in my initial post. read this and report back if the issue persists.

[deltanovember]

It was a font smoothing issue. Why is this turned off by default very strange

[obsd]

it isn't turned off by default. per the article i linked to, adobe reader 9 detects the type of monitor being utilized and chooses the 'best' text smoothing option; i suppose 'best' is an arbitrary specification though.

[Duncan Lukkenaer]

Why is this still not the default setting in 2018?!