Perplexing Indesign font rendering issues

Question

I have always used "Lato Heavy" as a font in PDFs we produce. Since yesterday, this font no longer renders as it used to (in Indesign preview or PDF). The only thing that has changed in the time which this issue has arisen is Creative Cloud updating itself. Some screenshots to illustrate my point:

Last week

PDF

this week

PDF

I have changed nothing in the indesign file between the two PDFs. The same PDF preset was used for both. Both screenshots were taken at the same level of zoom (66.7%). Interestingly, the issue is not present at 100%. I can understand that some fonts don't render correctly at all levels, but as Lato Heavy always has in the past, I can't think what is causing this.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as this one is causing me to tear my hair out!

Answer 1

This really seems like a rendering issue, 66.7% is really a tight percentage for scaling stuff that involves giving a pixel value at the end.

Things that may be causing this artifact:

• Your PDF viewer has a poor rendering engine.
• Your ClearType configuration in Windows is not properly set.
• you've set a broken natural value to the font size at the document (12.5, or even an odd number, some fonts react weirdly to odd font size numbers)
• you lack or got disabled graphics acceleration for the viewer