On Fri, Nov 03, 2006 at 04:19:15AM +1100, Philip Rhoades wrote:

I realise that gimp converts pdf and ps files into bitmaps when it opens the files but how can I improve the resolution of the resulting images? - even setting the input res to 600 when opening still leaves the image "bitty".

You can put the resolution up more than that, IIRC. Try 1200.

Even more likely to help is to use anti-aliasing on either the text, images or both, depending on the content.

Cheers, Craig

On Fri, Nov 03, 2006 at 05:50:37AM +1100, Philip Rhoades wrote:

Hi Philip,

Thanks for the note.

The anti-aliasing seemed to help a bit but 1200 res did not seem to make much difference (except for slowing down gimp dramatically) . . would it have something to do with not converting the Frutiger fonts cleanly?

I am already in over my head. I've had to convert quite a few postscript/pdf files to a raster format for various reasons, and I've always been lucky with adjusting those anti-aliasing settings that I mentioned before. I googled for Frutiger fonts, and saw a linotype webpage advertising them, but I know nothing about them, or postscripts handling of them.

Does the pdf show smoothly in a PDF or postscript viewer, e.g. Acrobat, gsview? Perhaps a crude, but last-resort way to convert these things would be to take a screenshot of those applications showing the PDF, then crop, and manipulate as normal.

Sorry if this isn't very helpful.

Craig

Philip Rhoades wrote:

The anti-aliasing seemed to help a bit but 1200 res did not seem to make much difference (except for slowing down gimp dramatically) . . would it have something to do with not converting the Frutiger fonts cleanly?

Do you look at the image at a zoom level of 100%?

Michael

Hi Philip,

On 11/3/06, gimp-user-request@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu wrote:

Message: 4
Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2006 06:11:52 +1100 From: Philip Rhoades
Subject: Re: [Gimp-user] Opening PDF and PS files I tried using pstoedit to create other vector editing formats but they DO have problems converting the font.

If this is a font issue then may be converting your text to outlines (instead of PDF) would do the job. Have you used Scribus? (http://www.scribus.net). At least, in Scribus, I can convert fonts to outlines - in addition to creating excellent PDFs.

-- Asif

On 11/3/06, Philip Rhoades wrote:

Do you look at the image at a zoom level of 100%?

Yes, you are correct - when I zoom to 100%, the fonts are smooth - now I am confused - why do the fonts look smooth in xpdf and bitty in gimp when the characters are about the same size on the screen?

It's just an artefact produced by the zooming. Xpdf does not have this problem because it is rendering a vector-based document and can recalculate how it should be rendered when you zoom in or out. Gimp renders the document at a given scale, and does not re-render it at any time -- it's not a vector-based viewer but an pixel-based image editor.

On 11/3/06, David Gowers wrote:

Do you look at the image at a zoom level of 100%?

Yes, you are correct - when I zoom to 100%, the fonts are smooth - now I

how it should be rendered when you zoom in or out. Gimp renders the document at a given scale, and does not re-render it at any time -- it's not a vector-based viewer but an pixel-based image editor.

GIMPs failure to display the image smoothly is because it takes a shortcut when zooming out of an image, it just uses one of the values from one of the image pixels occupying a single display pixel instead of averaging all that are contributing. This has been done for speed/ease of implementation, at some point in the future this will change.

/Øyvind K.