high-res images in pm6.5 ending up low res in PDF

[chrissyhsn]

I hope someone can help me with this.

A lot of the PDF documents I have to create contain images. I've tried a variety of different default distiller settings (screen, print, press), but no matter which I select, the images (especially photos - these are high-res tiffs for the most part) come out very low res, and are especially distorted if the images have been rotated at all in the Pagemaker document. Sometimes they display alright on the screen (although usually they even look slightly pixelated even at this level), but when they're printed, they look awful.

They only need to be of high enough quality to look good coming out of a desktop printer.

Can anyone help me figure out what distiller settings I might need to tweak to get this under control?

I'm working on a PC with Pagemaker 6.5 and Acrobat 5.0.

Cheers,
Chrissy

 

[StickMan]

there are three things you could check on:

1a) in Distiller|job options|compression tab, change the compression settings to Zip for color and grayscale. All the default settings (ebook, screen, print, press) use automatic compression. With automatic, Distiller determines to use either jpeg or Zip when compressing your graphics. Changing compression to Zip will force Distiller to use Zip only.

1b) also check the resample numbers (these are the "dpi" numbers to the right of the compression settings). if you don't want any resampling set both numbers to the highest res of your images (e.g., 600, 600) or better yet, set the numbers to a very high res like 1200 or 1800. This should stop Distiller from resampling any of your images (unless you happen to have images that are that hi-res)

the monochrome settings you can leave at default.

When you do change the compression/resample settings, you will need to save it as a new job option. Distiller will not let you "overwrite" the default job settings.

2) with Pagemaker, it could be printing the thumbnail header of the graphic file, rather than using the complete file. I haven't used pagemaker in a while so you might want to check the various print settings. this might also depend on a) how you placed the file (link/embed); b) are you printing from the same computer that the graphic files are on...

3) what format are the graphic files in when placed. if the placed files are not hi-res enough, might have to go to original file and fix it.

mike