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Exporting PDFs

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Exporting PDFs ErickG 16 Jun 14:21
  Exporting PDFs Liam R. E. Quin 21 Jun 23:53
  Exporting PDFs rich 22 Jun 08:49
  Exporting PDFs ErickG 22 Jun 13:22
ErickG
2016-06-16 14:21:55 UTC (almost 8 years ago)
postings
2

Exporting PDFs

Hi,
I read a few discussions but non seem to help. I don't like the export feature or that it increases my PDF sizes greatly, but I can work around it. My problem is whenever I export to PDF gimp is lowering the quality of my PDFs. I can deal with the export feature and the PDF size increase but not the loss in quality. To test this I used a line drawing, I opened it on gimp, without making any chances I exported it and right away I could tell the difference of just how much blurry the lines look. I done overwrite, export, export as, I tried looking into settings to see if I can increase the quality of the export but I'm not finding anything. Has anybody notice this? Any suggestions on what I can do?

Liam R. E. Quin
2016-06-21 23:53:06 UTC (almost 8 years ago)

Exporting PDFs

On Thu, 2016-06-16 at 16:21 +0200, ErickG wrote:

Hi, 
I read a few discussions but non seem to help. I don't like the export feature or that it increases my PDF sizes greatly

GIMP is not, and has never been, a PDF editor. It's nothing about the export feature - exactly the same export code was used when it was called Save.

[...]

To test this I used a line drawing, I opened it on gimp, without making any chances

Opening it in GIMP will rasterize the PDF to a new bitmap. In your case there's already a bitmap image in the input PDF, so GIMP will scale that image along with the whole page image. This loses information.

Either open the image without going through PDF, or use a program like Inkscape that can handle vector formats directly.

You can also extract the image from the PDF using inkscape (and there are command-line programs to do it too). In inkscape, click on the fish, then right-click and ungroup, then right-click and there's an option to export the image to a file.

Liam

Liam R. E. Quin
rich
2016-06-22 08:49:54 UTC (almost 8 years ago)

Exporting PDFs

ErickG gimpusers.com> writes:

Hi,
I read a few discussions but non seem to help. I don't like the export > feature or that it increases my PDF sizes greatly, but I can work around it. My problem is whenever I export to PDF gimp is lowering the quality of my PDFs. I can deal with the export feature and the PDF size increase but not the loss in quality.
Has anybody notice this? Any suggestions on what I can do?

The original is an embedded raster image, no vectors involved.

Can I just point out that Gimp default value for opening a PDF is 100 ppi. Which might/might not be the same as the original. Up to the user to adjust.

These values using linux pdfimages

width height color enc ppi --------------------------------------------- Adobe: 2545 1491 rgb jpeg 300x301

Gimp: 848 497 gray image(png) 101x100

Hardly surprising the difference in quality.

Suggestion: Sometimes difficult to determine the original size of a raster image in a PDF.
LibreOffice Draw usually plucks an image out in original size/format. If the PDF contains a vector image, then use Inkscape.

ErickG
2016-06-22 13:22:09 UTC (almost 8 years ago)
postings
2

Exporting PDFs

Thank you guys, this really has helped. I did not realize Gimps coding for PDFs has stayed the same through the different versions. I been scanning big layout plans in the plotter and the machine is saving them in a PDF format. Once I noticed the lower quality I tested it on this simple line drawing and that's when I noticed how much Gimp was lowering the quality, but I also didn't notice the import settings and here I am thinking it was an export feature problem. Thank you again!

Erick

Hi,
I read a few discussions but non seem to help. I don't like the export feature or that it increases my PDF sizes greatly, but I can work around it. My problem is whenever I export to PDF gimp is lowering the quality of my PDFs. I can deal with the export feature and the PDF size increase but not the loss in quality. To test this I used a line drawing, I opened it on gimp, without making any chances I exported it and right away I could tell the difference of just how much blurry the lines look. I done overwrite, export, export as, I tried looking into settings to see if I can increase the quality of the export but I'm not finding anything.
Has anybody notice this? Any suggestions on what I can do?