Incorrect display of line thickness

Question

Not sure if I should post this in the Acrobat-Mac or Acrobat-Windows forum, as I've looked at it on both platforms... we're mostly a Mac-based shop, so I've leaned that way.
Someone here created an ad in Illustrator. It uses Stone Sans, but they've converted all the fonts to outlines (as we sometimes to do with output, just to avoid font issues once the file goes out the door). But there's something weird about it. The ad looks perfectly fine in Illustrator (CS3, 13.0.2 with all the latest CS3 updates) or in Apple's Preview program. But if you look at it in Acrobat Pro (8.1.3), virtually every occurrence of the lowercase "l" in the add is overly thick. Reminder -- these really aren't lowercase "l" figures anymore -- they're outlines!
I've reviewed the original Illustrator files and all the outlines have the same stroke (none) and the same overprint settings. I printed the PDF to a laser printer and it *appears* to look okay... but I'm reluctant to send the ad file out like this.
I've looked at the PDF in Acrobat Pro 8.1.3 on the Mac (on both Mac OS X 10.4.11 and 10.5.6), and also checked it out in Acrobat Reader 9 on Windows (Vista SP1). I think the problem may possibly be on-screen only. It appears the closer you zoom in, the less prominent the problem appears. At 100%, it's very obvious. At 200%, it's still apparent but not quite as bad. At 400%, you have to look specifically at the "l" characters and then you'll notice it. At 800% I'm no longer sure if there's a difference but it appears it might be off by a fraction. At 1600% I cannot perceive any problem at all.
I've posted the original Illustrator file and the matching PDF at my website if anyone wants to take a peek at these.
http://www.fortbailey.com/acrobat/badlines.eps
http://www.fortbailey.com/acrobat/badlines.pdf
I'd like to be 100% sure this is just an on-screen display issue and will not affected the printed output. Can anyone say that with certainty?

Answer 1

MICHAEL CULPA & PGARY: Thanks for the sage and friendly advice. It is clear to me now that I should avoid using outlines like I have in the past. I'll be meeting with our artists tomorrow to review this. However, this raises one follow-up question that I hope you can comment on.
I hope this is a 100% onscreen only issue, because there are times we still *must* convert fonts to outlines. For example, if we design a logo for a client, it's been standard practice to use outlines in the EPS because -- most often -- the user is going to want to do something like slap the logo into their letterhead and print to a PCL6 printer. They're not going to want to buy the Adobe font for all their workstations or get a PostScript printer just to deal with the fact that we used Stone Sans for their logo... in cases like this, we've converted the fonts to outlines to avoid that whole situation. And we can't give them a PDF to embed into a Word document... I'm not even sure if the most recent version of Word would do that anyway, and it'd likely make it barf (I'll blame that on Microsoft Word but whatever... it's still an issue we need to be aware of for our clients). Is there anything that can be done when converting to outlines that would be helpful?
MIKE KAZLOW: Yeah, okay, maybe this issue has been beaten to death in the forum. But I didn't just blindly post my question without looking around first. I googled for this issue. I checked Adobe's knowledgebase. I did a search on this very forum for the word "thick" and the only posting that comes up with that criteria is this one. So while this might be all over the place in the forum, I couldn't find it. It wasn't for a lack of trying.
Just because you've seen the issue over and over again doesn't mean someone else isn't running into it for the first time. I've been managing computer systems for ad agencies for more than 15 years. I've been working with computers since CP/M (the operating system that came before DOS). I've been working in desktop publishing since the Mac IIfx was the hottest system in the business. I'm sorry I'm not a mathematics professor with a technical typesetting practice -- but that doesn't make me a moron either. I only post questions in these forums when I've gone through my own extensive repertoire of computer skills to solve a problem, and that means I'm looking for help, not snide remarks about my choice of workflow or how apparently my practices -- which have worked fine for years -- are "aeons" out of date. I appreciate the help and your advice, but you should couch your responses a little less harshly.
I and other people come to these forums as a last resort. We've been wracking our brains on a given problem for hours in some cases, done all the research and workarounds we can think of, and are desperately looking for help. A better-than-thou response is really like rubbing salt in a wound... it doesn't help, and it really just makes me want to bite back. You could stand to take a cue from the other guys who responded to this issue a little more politely.