RE: Quality of Grafics: SVG
... squares look fine at every resoulution, but the writing not, again at all resolutions. I tried different SVGs, some I didn't create myself, Try including the entry: entry keystrokeSVGText/key valuefalse/value /entry in your usefconfig.xml, anywhere within configuration. This prevents fonts from being converted to curves. They are embedded instead. Remember to run FOP with the -c option (eg: -c conf/userconfig.xml). I should warn you that this approach has its drawbacks - you might encounter problems viewing the text in GhostView, and not be able to *print* from Acrobat 4.0, on some postscript laserprinters. But Acrobat 5.0 appears to solve this. Cheers, Arnold Doray
RE: Quality of Grafics: SVG
Thanks a lot, that did the trick. Stephan -Original Message- From: Doray, Arnold [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Montag, 18. November 2002 09:26 To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: Quality of Grafics: SVG ... squares look fine at every resoulution, but the writing not, again at all resolutions. I tried different SVGs, some I didn't create myself, Try including the entry: entry keystrokeSVGText/key valuefalse/value /entry in your usefconfig.xml, anywhere within configuration. This prevents fonts from being converted to curves. They are embedded instead. Remember to run FOP with the -c option (eg: -c conf/userconfig.xml). I should warn you that this approach has its drawbacks - you might encounter problems viewing the text in GhostView, and not be able to *print* from Acrobat 4.0, on some postscript laserprinters. But Acrobat 5.0 appears to solve this. Cheers, Arnold Doray
Quality of Grafics
Hi list, Is there a way to improve the quality of graphics? I played around with high quality pictures and the better the quality, the bigger the resulting PDF (which makes sense), but the image looks good only with 100% view, which I hardly ever use. At all other sizes it gets quite ugly, no matter what I try. Is there a switch, like with the Acrobat Writer, for optimation? Stephan
Re: Quality of Grafics
Stephan- Are you noticing degraded image quality in a printed version of the PDF, or only in an on-screen display? If it's in the on-screen display, I would attribute the degradation to the way the PDF Viewer handles scaling of images. Rather than using a nice, blurred scaling algorithm, I believe the PDF Viewer uses a quick and dirty single-sample scaling algorithm, which can lead to distortion of the images, especially when viewed at odd factoring sizes like 66% or 75%. If it's in a printed PDF, then I have no explanation, although I'd like to see an example. I've implemented a system using FOP, which embeds hi resolution JPEGS into a PDF, and the printed output looks good, while the on-screen output can sometimes be a little grainy. It's not terribly noticeable on my images, since they're photographs, and don't generally have hard edges, which tend to show scaling shortcuts more than soft gradients. Hope that helps. -Jeff Stephan Wiesner [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] iesner.de cc: Subject: Quality of Grafics 11/15/2002 12:03 PM Please respond to fop-user Hi list, Is there a way to improve the quality of graphics? I played around with high quality pictures and the better the quality, the bigger the resulting PDF (which makes sense), but the image looks good only with 100% view, which I hardly ever use. At all other sizes it gets quite ugly, no matter what I try. Is there a switch, like with the Acrobat Writer, for optimation? Stephan
RE: Quality of Grafics
Hi Jef and thanks for the fast reply. The printout looks fine. It is printed with 100%, though, so that was to be expected. I use the current Acrobat Reader to view my files and I have commercial Documents, with graphics that look great no matter how large I scale, so it can not really be the viewer? Stephan -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Freitag, 15. November 2002 18:19 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Quality of Grafics Stephan- Are you noticing degraded image quality in a printed version of the PDF, or only in an on-screen display? If it's in the on-screen display, I would attribute the degradation to the way the PDF Viewer handles scaling of images. Rather than using a nice, blurred scaling algorithm, I believe the PDF Viewer uses a quick and dirty single-sample scaling algorithm, which can lead to distortion of the images, especially when viewed at odd factoring sizes like 66% or 75%. If it's in a printed PDF, then I have no explanation, although I'd like to see an example. I've implemented a system using FOP, which embeds hi resolution JPEGS into a PDF, and the printed output looks good, while the on-screen output can sometimes be a little grainy. It's not terribly noticeable on my images, since they're photographs, and don't generally have hard edges, which tend to show scaling shortcuts more than soft gradients. Hope that helps. -Jeff
RE: Quality of Grafics
Hi Jeff, Okay, I did prepare a document to send to you and, of course. I can get fine quality if I use very large pictures. I made them with my digital camera at 1600 resolution and formerly cut it to 25% size. This looked still very good on the screen, but not in the PDF. When I don't reduce the size, the quality is fine. This is, in my oppinion, because now the picture is at 100% when I set the Acrobat to 400%, which I don't do. The drawback, of course, is that the PDF gets real huge. I suppose that is a price I will have to pay, though and I can live with that. So, you helped me without really doing anything :-) Stephan -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Freitag, 15. November 2002 18:46 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Quality of Grafics Stephan- Based on the fact that your printed copy looks correct, I still think it might be a display issue. A quick and easy way to check it would be to create a test document containing multiple instances of the same image, each at a different size (either by specifying a scaling factor, or by specifying hard dimensional constraints (like pt or cm)). I'd bet (if I were a gambling man) that all of the printed results are going to look good, while your on-screen representations are going to be a crap shoot. Is the purpose of your project to create PDFs that are going to be primarily viewed on-screen, or on hard copy? And if possible, could you send me a copy of the offending PDF, and the image itself? (In a separate e-mail directly to my address; you'll probably get scolded if you post potentially large attachments to the group.) -Jeff
RE: Quality of Grafics
Stephan- Glad I could help (even if it was in a passive way) Just a few parting thoughts on the matter, although it sounds like you've got a pretty good idea of what's going on already. Before you go on, though, I must apologize for the use of U.S. units (inches, dots per inch, etc.) I'm just used to dealing with said units, and things actually come out to nicer, rounder numbers when using inches. So... You're right that scaling the image down will both reduce the size of your PDF, and the quality of the image. There are a few things you can do to find a happy medium between PDF size and image quality. The most obvious is to make sure you're using images of an appropriate resolution. If you're using a digital camera, to take 1600x1200 images, and the images get printed in a 4inch by 3 inch rectangle on your PDF, you're looking at a printed resolution of 400 DPI (Dots (or pixels, if you prefer) Per Inch.) My system is meant to allow people to choose ad templates, fill them with assets (copy, headlines, and photos) from a database, and create a print-ready PDF, meaning that said PDF could be taken to a commercial printer for a run of 50,000 copies, or submitted to a magazine or other print publication for publishing. I use 300 DPI as a minimum for my output, and the results are of the same quality as most glossy magazine advertisements. If that kind of quality is not necessary, you may want to try printing a PDF with the image printed at 200 DPI (this would be a 800x600 pixel image, provided the print dimensions are still 4 inches by 3 inches, as in my previous example.) This halves your resolution, but reduces your image size (for an uncompressed image) to 1/4 it's original size. A secondary way to reduce the size of your PDF, while (mostly) preserving image quality is to use JPEG images as an input, and to play with the quality setting of the JPEG. It's my understanding that when FOP puts images into a PDF, it internally converts them to a JPEG, UNLESS the input image is already a JPEG, in which case it simply embeds the image in the PDF. Basically, this means that by using JPEG-formatted images as your input, you have direct control over the number of bytes your image content takes up in the resulting PDF. Depending on your requirements, you may be able to significantly reduce the size of your PDFs by using these 2 methods in some sort of preprocessing step between pulling the image from the camera, and generating the actual PDF. Sorry about the huge reply, especially if it's information you already know. I didn't realize it was going to be this big, but perhaps it'll help some poor soul searching the archive in the future. -Jeff Stephan Wiesner [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] iesner.de cc: Subject: RE: Quality of Grafics 11/15/2002 01:27 PM Please respond to fop-user Hi Jeff, Okay, I did prepare a document to send to you and, of course. I can get fine quality if I use very large pictures. I made them with my digital camera at 1600 resolution and formerly cut it to 25% size. This looked still very good on the screen, but not in the PDF. When I don't reduce the size, the quality is fine. This is, in my oppinion, because now the picture is at 100% when I set the Acrobat to 400%, which I don't do. The drawback, of course, is that the PDF gets real huge. I suppose that is a price I will have to pay, though and I can live with that. So, you helped me without really doing anything :-) Stephan -Original Message- From: [EMAIL
RE: Quality of Grafics
Stephan Wiesner wrote: The printout looks fine. It is printed with 100%, though, so that was to be expected. I use the current Acrobat Reader to view my files and I have commercial Documents, with graphics that look great no matter how large I scale, so it can not really be the viewer? Your previous post indicated that your file size varied with the quality of the graphic, so I assume that the graphics you are embedding are raster. Is the same thing true of the commercial documents that you refer to above? I would expect vector graphics to look much better when scaled on screen or anywhere else. Also, you might experiment with the settings in the Smoothing section of the Edit / Preferences / General menu in Acrobat (I think it is in the same place on the Acrobat Reader). Victor Mote
