Re: Query on the slowness of printing PDFs and their quality

["E. Forrest Christian" <efc -at- USINGIT -dot- BE>]

J. Foster wrote:
> 1. It contains screenshots. These were BMP images converted to PCX =
> format and are black and white and not too large.
<--SNIP!-->
>Anyway, on screen, =
> and printed out, they look dreadfully blurry,

We use Acrobat and Word with only minor unsolvable problems, and I've been
doing it with Word 6 through 97 and all versions of Acrobat. I wouldn't go to
prepress without Acrobat anymore.

It sure sounds like the images were anti-aliased during resizing. That would
certainly get you the blurry look. It is about the only thing that comes to
mind reading your post. Are these images "black and white" meaning the pixels
are either black or white, or "black and white" as in "black and white
photography"? If they are supposed to only contain black or white pixels, you
may have converted them to grayscale and anti-aliased them. If they are
grayscales, then you probably resized them using an intelligent interpolation
such as bicubic. Do not use word to increase the size of graphics. Resize them
in an image editor and use "next neighbor" interpolation. It is really strange
that screenshots would appear blurry. Normally, they come out aliased. Do the
images appear blurry when examined in your image editor?

The printing time seems a bit long, but how long does it take to print in Word?

Of course, this may be of limited use, and your actual mileage may vary.
E. Forrest Christian
Using It bvba
email: efc @ usingit.be
http://www.usingit.be/

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