[thelist] Getting screenshots to look good in Word (and then PDF)

John Dowdell jdowdell at adobe.com
Mon Apr 3 19:13:50 CDT 2006


Rob wrote:
> I'm trying to get a screenshot of
> a webpage to look decent within a PDF. Taking screenshots, saving as
> GIF, inserting into Word to add other guff, then printing to PDF. As
> soon as they hit Word they look pretty awful though, and then printing
> to PDF the quality is reduced even further (using both PrimoPDF and
> CutePDF).

Microsoft Word doesn't have as many PDF export options as the real tools 
do... if you have Adobe Distiller, then this offers the most control 
over bitmaps in PDFs. But the bigger issue here may be the number of 
pixels in the image.

Computer interfaces and fonts are designed on a pixel-by-pixel basis. If 
the image is resized even a little bit then those pixels must be 
averaged together... you'll get JPEG-like artifacts even if you're 
saving to pixel-accurate GIF or PNG.

I don't know of any real way to prettify printed screencaptures, at 
least not without adding a lot more data to the file... if the screen 
has 1024 dots by 768 dots, and you're going to a printer with 300 or 
more dots per inch, then the result will tend to look blocky even if the 
pixels aren't averaged together at all. But print-res images are large, 
regardless... there's a hard choice to be made between compact files and 
interpolating extra pixels into a screencap in case it's printed. Hard 
either way.

jd




-- 
John Dowdell . Adobe Developer Support . San Francisco CA USA
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