rnildly infuriating

Character space‽ In this economy‽

Usually due to the use of a non-standard font without including it in the PDF. The viewer substitutes the font with the closest it can find. The glyphs' spacing remains from the original font, though.

It looks like a font substitution issue. You don’t have the type face installed that was originally used to create this PDF. And the font was not embedded in the PDF. So whatever you’re using to view, the PDF is utilizing something like Aerial or Helvetica as a stand in sans serif type face but retaining the kerning/layout used for the original font.

Horrible keming

that's pretty bad, but it bothers me less than when you can't pick a space apart becauseeverythinglooksclumpedtogether

That kerning issue is so distinctive that I knew where the document was from from the preview snapshot which didn't show the ISTA header. It is actually funny how horrible their Pdfs on their website are and how nobody cares to fix it.

I actually like this, guess I'm a psychopath

Not that bad, still ugly. It's worse if seen in the browser, so maybe it downloads the font there.

This is tracking (overall character space) set negative, for whatever reason, usually ignorance. Kerning is the act of adjusting the space between two characters, such as an uppercase 'A', and an uppercase 'V', to fit more closely together. A good rule is to leave the typeface in body text at 0 tracking, default--most typefaces do just fine in body text with "metric kerning". Manual kerning is only for headers, titles, signs, etc. and should be used only when needed.

If they needed the body copy to take up less space, they should have used a condensed typeface, instead of messing with tracking. People like to hate on Helvetica, but the inclusion of so many different fonts in the typeface make it very useful for this reason.

My eyes!!