Sending perspective view to layout. Prints Blurry

[Dermot]

Regarding resolutions, here is my understanding of how it works in Chief:

 

Current Screen As Image - This basically just captures the pixels from the current window.  Depending on your screen resolution and the window size this could be anything from ok to very poor resolution.  This will never be greater then screen resolution.

 

Export/Import Picture - Since you can specify the resolution, this can be very high, very low, or anything in between.

 

Live Views - Image is always regenerated using printer resolution at the time it is printed.  What you see on your computer screen is not necessarily what will be printed.  When you send it to a PDF file, it should look fine when printed but may still look pixelated if you look at the PDF on your computer screen and zoom way in.  That is kind of like printing it out on paper and then looking at it with a magnifying glass. 

 

There may also be a hardcoded limit for the maximum size.  I vaguely remember the engineer who wrote this code telling me something to that affect.  Something having to do with very large images causing performance problems or running out of memory on some printers.  At any rate, he is not available at the moment.

[Alaskan_Son]

Regarding resolutions, here is my understanding of how it works in Chief:

 

Current Screen As Image - This basically just captures the pixels from the current window.  Depending on your screen resolution and the window size this could be anything from ok to very poor resolution.  This will never be greater then screen resolution.

 

Export/Import Picture - Since you can specify the resolution, this can be very high, very low, or anything in between.

 

Live Views - Image is always regenerated using printer resolution at the time it is printed.  What you see on your computer screen is not necessarily what will be printed.  When you send it to a PDF file, it should look fine when printed but may still look pixelated if you look at the PDF on your computer screen and zoom way in.  That is kind of like printing it out on paper and then looking at it with a magnifying glass. 

 

This is exactly as I understand it as well.  What I'm trying to figure out though is what dpi the live views are limited to.  My PDF proves that its not unlimited.  In other words...

 

I know what the Current Screen As Image resolution is.  It's equal to my current screen size.

 

I know what the exported/imported image resolution is.  It's whatever I set it to be.

 

I DO NOT know what the Live View resolution is.  It doesn't seem to be all that much better (if any) than what I can get using Current Screen As Image with 1920x1080 screen.  Live Views obviously have some finite resolution limit when its not a vector based view and it would be nice to know what that limit is. 

[Joe_Carrick]

Michael,

 

Just to clarify.  When you display a PDF on your monitor - the display is limited to the resolution of the monitor.

When the same PDF is printed on a printer, the resolution is whatever the printer supports.

 

So, you can never get a screen shot that exceeds the monitor resolution.  That's going to be the same no matter how you display a picture (rendering)

[Alaskan_Son]

Michael,

Just to clarify. When you display a PDF on your monitor - the display is limited to the resolution of the monitor.

When the same PDF is printed on a printer, the resolution is whatever the printer supports.

So, you can never get a screen shot that exceeds the monitor resolution. That's going to be the same no matter how you display a picture (rendering)

I fully understand that. The thing is that you can still inspect the resolution of a PDF (or image) by zooming in just as you can inspect a picture with a magnifying glass. In the original 2 page PDF I posted notice how you can zoom in as close as you like and the quality of the text never seems to diminish? That's because the text is vector based and lossless or infinitely scale-able. Notice how the quality of the images become pixelated though? That's because they are raster based or bitmap. What you are seeing are actual pixels. Those will not improve no matter what printer you try to send them to. You are essentially seeing the quality limits or resolution of what will print. Now zoom in on the high res PDF I posted last. Notice how the pixels are much smaller? That's because it has a higher resolution ...more pixels per inch.

What I am saying is that it doesn't matter what your monitor is capable of, you can still inspect resolution by zooming in and per my tests, the resolution of Live Views is barely (if at all) better than Current Screen As Image...at least with the PPI of my monitor.

It sounds to me like you're basically trying to claim Chief's live views are somehow vector based and lossless...like they are somehow limited only by the resolution or dpi limits of the printer. This is simply not true or else the images in those PDFs would behave exactly like the text does and would remain smooth and sharp no matter how close you zoom in...but obviously it doesn't. Like I said, there's some sort of finite resolution limit to those non-vector based live views and I'm just curious what it is. I don't think it's really all that high. If it was, the file size of layouts and PDFs would be huge whenever there were any non-vector images involved .

[DRAWZILLA]

The file size in Chief's pdf's at the same resolution are very large as compared to using Adobe acrobat. So I use Adobe. Why, I don't know.

[Alaskan_Son]

The file size in Chief's pdf's at the same resolution are very large as compared to using Adobe acrobat. So I use Adobe. Why, I don't know.

I've never used Adobe myself so I'm not sure how they handle it, but I know there are a good half dozen PDF formats and various ways they can be printed/saved. Most dedicated PDF printing/editing software will allow the user to control those settings however I think that with many built in PDF printers those settings are preset and can't be changed. My guess is that you could get larger file output out of Adobe too by adjusting some of those options (embedded fonts/images/colors, searchable text, security features, encryption, form field support, layering capability, transparency, resolution, enhanced readability features, and many others).

I'm thinking maybe Chief set their PDF printer up to maintain many features and capabilities (some of which we may not use or need) but I also think that as the creator of PDF that perhaps Adobe still has a few tricks up their sleeves that allow for more efficient file creation.

I usually use Chief's built in PDF printer but I use Microsoft's built in PDF printer for my Word docs and NitroPro for most of my other apps. I think I have one or 2 other PDF printers installed too. I guess I've never really cared about file size because most of our layouts are fairly small. I imagine for many of you who produce large CD sets that file size is probably a notable factor. I might just have to test the difference in file size output for all the printers I have installed...might be interesting...or not.