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1) At least upgrading to Distiller 3.02. Find this on the support\downloads
page at http://www.adobe.com.
2) Upgrading to Distiller 4.0x. This will cost you $$, but the aliasing in
Distiller 4 *is* much better than the 3.0x (where there was no aliasing).
3) Turning off all resampling and compression (in Distiller|Job options).
(After testing with no comression or resampling for a while, you can
experiment with these settings.)
Compression settings I use include compressing fonts, subsetting 100% of
fonts, no resampling (all y images are at 120 dpi, anyway, so you might want
to resample to 120 dpi), ZIP 8-bit compression for color and greyscale, CCIT
compression for line art with downsampling to at least 300 dpi.
4) Setting the dpi of your PDF to the linescreen of your printer and to a
value that is evenly divisible into the dpi resolution of your printer.
120dpi would be a decent number if you output to a 600 dpi laser printer. If
you are skeptical, try setting this to 600 dpi and seeing for yourself
whether the on-screen and in-print quality changes. Screen resolutions max
out about 96 dpi.
5) If the PDF images still look poor after this, try zooming and try
printing. If they look good under zoom and in-print, then what you see at
100% is as good as it gets.
Also, see below. Hope this helps.
Sean
sean -at- quodata -dot- com
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ron Rhodes [SMTP:RRhodes -at- fourthchannel -dot- com]
>
> I am creating a pdf from an existing user manual. I am using Acrobat
> Distiller 3.01 and I cannot seem to produce good quality graphics when I
> generate the PDF. I have tried, JPG, PNG, BMP, and GIF.
>
When trying to figure out what format, how to create a PDF, etc., it is
important to know what output is expected. I recommend staying away from JPG
for screen grabs because it's lossy. I use BMP. GIF might work, too. PNG is
pretty new and is slowly becoming more supported. I'd avoid it, for now,
too. BMP supports 24-bit color and GIF supports 8-bit. However, for 4-color
press, none of these will do, but neither will MS Word. Thus, I assume you
are outputting to a 600 dpi laser or, at the most, a 600 dpi Xerox Docutech.
BMP and GIF are both fine for PDF creation for these printers.
> I snap screens
> with the ALT+PrntScreen function
>
The problem with this is it captures the screen at the resolution and color
depth of your desktop, 96 dpi and 24-bit? Consider a tool for making and
resampling captures on the fly, such as SnagIT32 from http://www.techsmith.com.
> and then I crop and save them in PhotoShop.
>
Do you resample in Photoshop?
> I am using Microsoft Word as my document authoring tool
>
I recommend importing the images by reference.
> Has anybody learned a few cool tricks?
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Ron D. Rhodes
