On 31/01/2006, at 15:42 , James Anderson wrote:
Details: An A4 word document with two PDF's inserted in the header
and footer. The 'images' are only two colours, orange and black.
The text is crystal clear, but the image appear fuzzy every time. I
have reset the picture's properties in word (I was worried that
resizing it may have lost quality). I have made sure the printer is
set to print best quality. When I zoom to 100% in word the image
appear fuzzy.
Why word is the problem: I printed the PDF's (the images I'm
inserting into the word doc) from Preview and they printed and
appeared crystal clear.
A similar problem plagued me, but yours may be different...
Word doesn't handle inserted vector graphics like EPS or PDF at all
well. On screen, you see a low-resolution preview version (which
sometimes actually looks pretty good), and unless you print to a
postscript printer, you also get the preview printed. A postscript
printer will print at full resolution.[1]
The solution is to use an alternative image format, and the most
reliable for Word, I've found, is TIFF (You can use Preview to
convert your PDF). However, since you mention that you've tried JPEG,
and got the same result, it may be an entirely different problem.
If anyone can shed light onto why word makes these images appear
fuzzy I would really appreciate it. Perhaps I need to try different
formats for the images or there is a function I don't know about in
word which decreases the quality of the image. The same problem
appears to happen with a similar JPEG image.
[1] Incidentally, if you print to PDF, you get the crappy preview
images in the PDF file, and it will *never* print properly. However,
if you "Save PDF as Postscript" (press the PDF button in the Print
menu), you will have pristine-quality EPS/PDF graphics from your Word
file.
-josh
<http://josh.corduroy.biz>
