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Subject:Re: Word to PDF incongruities From:Christine -dot- Anameier -at- seagate -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 18 Jan 2001 16:42:42 -0600
Jason Logue wrote:
< Since Acrobat has helped reduce time and money in the whole printing
process, I'm wanting to implement its
use on our web page. But right now the images in the converted documents
appear fuzzy (sometimes even worse). The text is fine, though. Also, when
the pdf files are printed out, they look fine. >
Boy, does this sound familiar. I went through this a couple of years ago
too. Another writer and I tried every file format imaginable for the
images, tweaked the Distiller settings every which way, and never did find
a wholly satisfactory solution. We were able to get it so the images would
look right on screen at 100%--but then the text was usually too small to
read, or if we enlarged the text, it looked too big when printed. (IIRC, we
accomplished this minor improvement by setting the image compression in
Distiller to Zip, not JPEG, and by turning off downsampling.)
The thing is, PDF is not really an online format. It's handy for delivering
files that are meant to be printed because you eliminate the pagination
problems that come with having different printer drivers. As you said, the
images print fine. But PDFs tend to be unpleasant to read online,
especially for long documents--flipping pages in a PDF can be cumbersome.
Documents designed for print aren't optimized for online use. People often
try to use PDF as an easy way to dump existing print materials online, but
the result can be awful (ever tried to read a 200-page manual on a 72-dpi
screen?). IMO, you're better off with HTML for writing that's meant to be
read online.
Christine
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