[pdftex] Re: Best bitmap image format?

[gnwiii at gmail.com]

On 2/25/06, Olivier Lefevre <lefevrol at yahoo.com> wrote:
> So, what is your own pipeline? Which format do you save to and which
> tool do you use to convert to PDF?

Each image type needs a different pipeline.  Most tools (except the
ones that make PDF's with raster images for simple line drawings) are
good enough if you are aiming for screen viewing on the same hardware.
  An empty set of tools are good enough for really high quality
printing or (most demanding) film, so you have to expect some heavy
manual tweaking.

The fully reliable tools for print and web viewing come from Adobe,
but recent versions of ImageMagick have some color management support.
 An increasing number of apps do offer "save to pdf", but the results
may still need to be rescued in Photoshop.   Cinepaint is the tool of
choice if you need maximum color depth (more than you will get from a
printer, e.g., screen or film output with richly colored images).

In the simple case of screen shots for a PDF that will be viewed on
the same hardware, the sample your tool generated might be OK, but if
you look closely at your screen shots, you will see a lot of funny
colors around text that are probably due to clear-type anti-aliasing
(did you use an LCD display?).   I suspect ImageMagick will give
similar PDF converting one of the other formats.  You should avoid
anti-aliasing in the display used for screen dumps and hope that the
PDF rasterizer supplies anti-aliasing when the documents are viewed.

Isn't there a virtual display for Windows that dumps to vector emf?

Printing is a whole different story.  Even using Adobe tools it
sometimes takes careful setup and manual cleanup, e.g., to make "pure"
blacks when converting RGB to CMYK.

--
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia