Before Acrobat 5 was released, how did people deal with such terrible looking line art on their screen in PDFs? Is there some sort of hack that I’m unaware of?
Perhaps worth noting that IIRC the original purpose of Acrobat was to facilitate printing, rather than for reading on-screen. So when displaying it on-screen, the purpose was to make sure that it would print properly. So perhaps it isn't as critical as you think.
Also, I'd note that making things look smooth on low-resolution (as we'd think of them today) displays isn't entirely simple and has a CPU cost associated with it.
This kind of thing is something you've posted a couple of times now, and I think you may have ... a slight glitch in the way you're thinking about how tools develop. Expectations and tools develop hand in hand. Fundamentally, people dealt with it because it did something they needed to do better than the options that came before it, and because they didn't expect what you are expecting. You are coming from a modern machine, but they were not, so the experiences to set those expectations up hadn't happened yet. For context, as far as I know when Acrobat was first released, only one line of computers was doing OS-wide text smoothing for outline fonts. And it was slow (but
very pretty).
(A thought exercise: what do you think people will say "how did they deal with x" about the systems you like now?)
So you have to understand that all tools proceed by local improvements and occasional big jumps, but never a jump to "perfection". And no tool and its use can be understood by what came after it, really only what came before it, because that's the direction causality works in.
It might also help to think of people and their tools in very intimate dialogue, such that the process of thinking is actually in some ways "spread out" between the person and the tool. I can't remember the book I have on the subject—my books are all ahoo at the moment—but "distributed cognition" is the name of that area of research.