On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 8:48 AM, Kamilla Elliott wrote:

the pdf files produced in Gimp are unacceptable. Any solutions? Thanks.

Try flattening the image before exporting (Image->Flatten Image). Just be careful not to save the XCF afterwards.

Chris

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Kamilla Elliott wrote:

Thank you so much for the speedy reply. That does improve the res and sorts out the font problems totally. It's still not printer ready--the photos, which are very high res when I import them, remain a bit too soft and blurry. I have the file at 100ppi--when I create one at 300ppi and recreate it, it becomes the size of a postage stamp so it's hard to see the res. on that one. I will keep plugging along. Thanks again.

I'm not sure I follow you, but you might be hitting an old and tricky bug that sometimes causes problems when scaling. You might try resizing in steps - eg, scale it about 50% of the way then scale it to the right size on the next pass. It's been a while since I had to do this - I don't remember if I had to do it in just 2 passes or more.

Chris

PS - hit "reply all" to respond to the mailing list ;)

On 11/17/2012 12:59 PM, Kamilla Elliott wrote:

Thanks again for your response. Sorry to be unclear. I first made the xcf at 100 ppi, importing photos and adding text; then when I had trouble exporting it to pdf (the photos were too blurry), I re-created it from scratch, setting it at 300ppi using Advanced Options under 'New File'. But when I exported it to pdf, it was teeny tiny--about 2 inches by 1 inch instead of 11 x 6 inches. So I couldn't see if it was high res, since I had to zoom to about 450% to see it, by which time it was blurry again. I'm trying a new document from scratch with very high res photos to see if that will help. Thanks again for helping me--your e-mail helped me make more progress than I managed to make all day.

I think you might be mixing up image resolution and print size.

Print size can be shown in inches (say 11.75 x 10.69) ormillimeters (say 298 x 271). Image resolution is in pixels per inch (say 72for square pixels) or pixels per mm (2.83 in this case).

The pdf image will normally print in theprint size specified; so when you changed the xcf to 300 from 100 ppi, the print image reduced by a factor of three (so I think it would have printed 4 x 2
rather than 2 x 1 - maybe you used 600 ppi?)

-- Burnie

On Sat, 2012-11-17 at 12:59 -0800, Kamilla Elliott wrote:

when I exported it to pdf, it was teeny tiny--about 2 inches by 1 inch

Check that "File->Print Size" is plausible. It might be that it's using the size from one of the images you pasted.

Always work at either the final resolution or (much better if your computer is up to at) twice that resolution. So if you want to end up with 600dpi, ideally you'd work at 1200dpi in GIMP and resize as the very last step, *after* saving as xcf.gz.

The reason for going double is that processing images tends to reduce quality (it's like food!). The reason for starting at the target resolution or higher is that image software can't invent extra detail for higher resolution.

If you have performance problems, save your work often as .xcf or .xcf.gz (same but smaller files).

When it comes to printing, depending on the platform, File->Page Setup may or may not make a difference.

Liam

Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 2:59 PM, Kamilla Elliott wrote:

But when I exported it to pdf, it was teeny tiny--about 2 inches by 1 inch instead of 11 x 6 inches.

As others have mentioned, check your print size.

If all else fails, export it as PNG or TIFF, create a new document in Scribus, import your image, export as PDF. Scribus has pretty robust PDF output - I've sent quite a few PDFs to print with no issues.

Chris

PS - I now notice you are on the developer mailing list. gimp-user is probably a better option for future requests like these (gimp-devel is more geared toward people hacking on GIMP). No biggie though ;)