Font Prints With Jagged Edges

Okay, I have a document in which I used a font that I downloaded for free (yeah, I know*) and which has no italics set. After I had used it and gotten the work approved, I was asked to italicize a web address that was set in this font. So, I skewed it using the Indesign character pallette. I had heard before that this sometimes causes problems on the print side, but I figured I'd give it a shot. Unfortunately, when the samples came back the font edges were bumpy, almost like noise in a raster image. So, for my next magical trick I selected that text and converted it to outlines. This produced pretty much the exact same result.



One last piece of weirdness: To work around the problem for now, we ditched the italics altogether. Now I get an e-mail telling me that even the unaltered font ''still doesn't look terrific''. Going to see for myself now.



My questions are: What causes this? Why didn't the edges get smoother when converted to vector curves? Does a better solution exist (other than the obvious one of using a different font)? Any insight will be appreciated.



* I work for a State agency and we have limited resources, so purchasing a decent selection of fonts isn't an option. I found a couple of sites that offer many decorative fonts for download and have been using them without an issue for a couple of years now. I'm sure they're not Adobe quality, but they've worked fine until now.
Font Prints With Jagged Edges
%26gt;so purchasing a decent selection of fonts isn't an option



But using the excellent fonts that come packaged with Adobe apps ought to be. And if you need one or two other faces, many good quality faces can be purchased for less than $30/style or weight if you only want one or two, or in family packages for around $100 that contain the usual regular, bold, italic, and bold italic variants. Adobe also has some other excellent font packages with a variety of faces, like Adobe Type Basics, for example, that are quite inexpensive and are a good way to start a collection.
Font Prints With Jagged Edges
What Peter's too polite to say is that you've already fingered the culprit: a badly designed font. There are few things more subtly, artfully and cleverly engineered than a font package. They are more complex than a simple collection of outlines - at least, well-engineered fonts are. If you take a cheap font package with none of the hinting, advanced metrics (sizing and spacing data) etc., you'll get very erratic results.



You don't have to buy Adobe. But free is worth what you pay for it... or less. :P

%26gt;You don't have to buy Adobe. But free is worth what you pay for it...



I didn't mean to imply that Adobe was the only source of quality fonts. I buy from other foundries as well, but I think Adobe has more inexpensive options than many of the other big names (though not all quality fonts come from big names, either).



But you DO get a bunch of very fine, and classic, Adobe fonts FREE with InDesign, and even more if you bought the whole suite. :)



I have no idea what the free font in question is, but unless it was something in a wild display face (which seems pretty unlikely, given the usage description), there should be no problem finding a suitable replacement in what came with the software.



Peter

No, the font is hardly anything exotic and I can swap it out for something else, I just wanted to be sure I knew what the problem was. I've used many fonts from thie same site and never had an issue, so I thought the problem might be something other than the font itself. Anyway, I appreciate your input and will now go on a quest for a new font ...