DPI Recommendation for Images

[Shane Taylor]

Also consider whether your audience will be viewing the PDF on a Windows, Mac, Linux, or UNIX machine, because the zoom level to match monitor pixels will vary based on the system DPI setting (and possibly the PDF viewer).

Since we couldn't provide a consistently optimal viewing experience for users across platforms, we decided to use 150 DPI because that provides good print output (as a factor of most printer DPI capabilities).

Shane Taylor



On Mar 22, 2011, at 1:13 PM, Joseph Lorenzini wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to get people's opinion on what they think is the best choice for DPI. Right now I import images into FrameMaker at a DPI of 144. This means that the PDF must be zoomed to 150% if the image pixels are to match the monitor pixels (i.e. it would be like zooming it to 100%).  However, I set the default zoom in the PDFs to 125% because I thought that 150% was just too big and overwhelming in a PDF. This means that the images look degraded. I'd like to improve this. 
> 
> As I see it, I have two options.
> 
> (1) In FrameMaker, I could change each image's DPI to 120. This means that the image would NOT look degraded in a PDF at a zoom level of 125%. The drawbacks are two fold: 1) I have an enormous amount of documentation and it would take a considerable amount of time changing the DPIs for each image though I suspect there may be a plugin out there that could automate this process for each book. 2) Images would be noticeably bigger and take up more space in the documentation. 
> 
> (2) I could set the default zoom in the PDFs to 150%. The upside to this is that its a very trivial change. The downside is that the PDFs would be enormous. On a monitor resolution of 1200x1600 it looks big but ok, whereas on 1024x768 I find it to be too large to be readable. Admittedly, I am assuming that most users in a corporate environment would have monitors with a maximum resolution of 1200x1600 but I don't know for sure.  Plus, not everyone likes a res that high. 
> 
> So what say you all? Which option do you favor and why? And of course, if there's another option I haven't thought please let me know.
> 
> Thanks,
> Joe 
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