high-res images in pm6.5 ending up low-res in PDF 2

[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

 

[jimoblak]

The problem may occurring before distilling.

If you are printing to a PS file to distill later in Acrobat, check the image output settings in PageMaker's print dialog. Make sure the resolution is 'normal' and not 'optimized subsampling'.

 

[cyberboy]

Chrissy,
I feel your pain. This probably has to be the biggest bone of contention that we have using PM under Windows. I'm sure you're following the preferred convention of placing, rather than inserting images! I know it doesn't help you too much with coloured images (photos), but sometimes we achieve better results when images are turned into greyscale (We're only printing b/w.

jimoblak,
Chrissy may not have this option. I believe that it all depends on the printer driver being used. We have various OSs (95/98/2000) all using PM7, but with different print drivers and some users do not have this option. Also, ironically, on my system I get better results when 'optimized subsampling' is set, rather than 'normal'. Go figure!!

 

[jimoblak]

What cyberboy describes in his second paragraph should not be happening - - but that's computers for ya. For best results, download the most recent PostScript printer driver from Adobe.com and set up a virtual PS printer for your distilling workflow. It's free and is a 'must' if you are creating a PostScript file to distill.

 

[chrissyhsn]

jimoblak,

Thank you so much! Your suggestion was exactly correct - in the print dialog for Acrobat distiller (in PM 6.5) the images were indeed set to "optimized subsampling", and when I changed it to "normal", the images on my new PDF displayed and printed beautifully.

Again, thanks!
~Chrissy