FreePDF XP Image and Graphics Handling
FreePDF XP Image and Graphics Handling
Remember the Settings
by Michael Maretzke
29th July 2008
Version 1.0 -1 - 29th July 2008
FreePDF XP Image and Graphics Handling
Background
The Portable Document Format (PDF), developed by Adobe and released in 1993 evolved fast to the de-facto industry standard for platform independent document representation. The generation of PDF documents remained quite some time the domain of costly tools like Acrobat Distiller.
Freely available alternatives are now accessible via the internet. They usually install as a printer driver and produce quite good quality results.
One of the most-known and most-used products is FreePDF XP (http://freepdfxp.de/index.html) written by Stefan Heinz.
Tricky, however, is to configure the printer driver to generate good quality text and graphics. Especially, bitmaps and PowerPoint graphics are tricky to handle.
Since, I’m not interested to figure out which parameters to set to get high-quality results each and every time I need them, I’m spending some time to document what I did – and make it available to the public J
Environment
The following text refers to a Windows XP installation in English language with SP2 installed.
FreePDF XP is installed in version 3.24. Ghostscript is installed in version 8.54. The printer driver used to generate PostScript is “Apple Color LW 12/660 PS”. The profile used to generate the PDF output is named “High Quality”.
Graphic from PowerPoint
PowerPoint is frequently used to generate graphics that should be used in a Word document resulting actually in a PDF file.
After generating the graphic, the portion to be inserted into the document is marked and copied into the Windows clipboard (STRG+C). Now, back in Word, it’s not a simple paste operation (STRG+V), but to gain better results, use “Edit” “Paste Special …” to insert the graphic. In the following dialog box, there are quite some alternatives shown. The following graphic is copied into this Word document exactly as described above. The caption of the graphic shows the selected option for insertion.
Figure 1Picture (Windows Meta File)
Figure 2 Bitmap
Figure 3 MS Office Drawing Object
Figure 4 Picture (Enhanced Metafile)
Figure 5 Picture (GIF)
Figure 6 Picture (PNG)
Figure 7 Picture (JPEG)
On my system the option Picture (Enhanced Metafile) resulted in the best results in the Word document and the PDF document.
Bitmap from PaintShop Pro
PaintShop Pro is used to generate bitmaps, to crop snapshots and so on. These bitmaps are marked and copied into the Windows Clipboard and then again inserted into the Word document via the “Edit” “Paste Special…” menu.
Figure 8 Picture (Windows Meta File)
Figure 9 Bitmap
Figure 10 Device Independent Bitmap
Figure 11 Copy&Paste:
Finally, the last figure shows a bitmap copied and pasted normally to Word. It seems that both in Word and PDF, the Bitmap option seems to result in highest quality images.
Version 1.0 -1 - 29th July 2008