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I was not following this thread carefully, so please excuse me if someone has already mentioned this:
If you have screen shots as GIF files, then the culprit in fuzzy images is not the resolution but the compression. JPEG compression will cause your screen shots to be fuzzy, probably no matter how high a quality (and low a compression) you set it for.
My bet is that you have Compression set to Automatic or JPEG. Set the compression to ZIP.
ZIP is a lossless compression that is well suited for screen shots. Lossless means that when Acrobat decompresses the image to display it, the data will be the exact image that you fed into Distiller. JPEG is lossy compression, which means that what you get after decompressing is not what you started with. The idea is that your eye won't notice the difference, but with screen shots or any hard-edged line art, you will notice, as you have.
There is something called 4-bit ZIP. (At least I think there was in Distiller 4.) This drops the least significant 4 bits of each byte, keeping only the 4 most significant bits. In essence, it rounds off the color values. This is a lossy process. Then, the data is zipped, and this part of the process is lossless. What is being lost is that color values are getting rounded off, but individual pixels are not being combined with other pixels, thus 4 bit zip will not cause blurriness, but it might cause color banding if you have lots of smooth shading.
I am reaching into my memory banks, but I seem to remember that GIF images fool Distiller. Distiller has compression settings for Color Images and Monochrome images. (I don't remember if Distiller 4 uses those same names.) Your GIF files make Acrobat Distiller think that they are color images, and it will use the JPEG compression that you surely have set as the compression for Color Images.
If some of those GIF files are true contone image files and you want them JPEG compressed, you may have some luck changing the screen shots into another file format that Distiller will recognize as not contone and will not use the Color Images compression setting.
Contone - continuous tone. As in, a photograph, where colors span a continuous range of tones. This is different from an indexed image like your screen shot, where there are certain set color tones (red or black or white, etc.) but not every color in between.
Regards, Dan-Ari
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