Screen captures and sizing

[Combs, Richard]

Spectrum Writing wrote:

> When  I create the PDF, I am manually distilling the file - I don't do
a
> "Save as PDF. I use the Adobe printer to print to a postscript file,
and
> then distill the postscript file to a PDF. I don't change anything any
of
> the settings in Distiller - I use the standard settings option and
don't
> change anything.

Tammy, your process for creating the screen shots, sizing them, and
creating the PDF all sound just fine to me (point of information: for
FM7 or newer, Save as PDF works fine as long as Adobe PDF is the default
printer). So how do the screen shots look to you?

The general rule for print is to make the image DPI evenly divisible
into the output DPI -- so 100, 120, 150, and 200 work well for the
standard 600 DPI laser printer. 

For screen display, Ian Hawkins' DPI suggestions may help some. But
there are so many variables involved in monitors, display settings, zoom
factor, etc. Adobe Reader's default settings more often than not result
in PDFs displaying at 96%, 83%, 102%, or some such. So there's no way to
"optimize" your screen shots up front for all these possibilities. Maybe
that's why smoothing, when desired, is applied at the display end --
Acrobat Pro and Adobe Reader have Page Display preference settings for
them.

I suggest you smile and tell the client, "Font, line art, and image
smoothing are Page Display preference settings in Adobe Reader (and
Acrobat Pro). Maybe you don't have them enabled? Or maybe there's
something else that's bothering you?" 

I can think of one other thing you might try. You said you use the
"standard settings option" in Distiller. That should be fine from the
image downsampling standpoint, but it does use JPEG compression. I use
settings based on Standard, but using ZIP compression instead of JPEG
(FYI, each Settings selection is a .joboptions file, and you can easily
make your own customized ones). I've convinced myself that produces
slightly better images in some cases -- YMMV. :-) 

Here's how to do it in Distiller 7: 

1) Open Distiller, confirm that Standard is selected under Adobe PDF
Settings, and from the Settings menu, select Edit Adobe PDF Settings. 

2) In the dialog, on the left, select Images. Change the Compression
settings for color and grayscale images from Automatic (JPEG) to ZIP. 

3) Optionally, on the left, select General and edit the Description. 

4) Click Save As. In the dialog give your settings file a descriptive
name (like Standard-ZIP.joboptions) and click Save. 

Try making two PDFs of the same book, one using Standard and one using
Standard-ZIP. Then look at them both at various zoom settings and see
what you think. Maybe you can get the client to help you. :-)

Good luck!
Richard


Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
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