Any way to print PDF files so the type is easier to read?

[Muse]

Is there a darn thing I can do to sharpen it up? I have an HP4M laserjet printer and normal printing is sharp as a tack. PDF's, or at least some of them, I get tiny tiny little black dots sourounding the letters. I'm using my postscript driver for the printer and Adobe Acrobat 7.0.9. I'm printing a document with very small type size and it's a strain to read.

 

[crimson117]

Originally posted by: Muse
Is there a darn thing I can do to sharpen it up? I have an HP4M laserjet printer and normal printing is sharp as a tack. PDF's, or at least some of them, I get tiny tiny little black dots sourounding the letters. I'm using my postscript driver for the printer and Adobe Acrobat 7.0.9. I'm printing a document with very small type size and it's a strain to read.

Is the PDF itself of poor quality, perhaps from a rough scan of a document?

Or are you making PDF's right out of Word, and the PDF prints worse than the Word document alone?

Can you post some samples?

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: crimson117

Originally posted by: Muse
Is there a darn thing I can do to sharpen it up? I have an HP4M laserjet printer and normal printing is sharp as a tack. PDF's, or at least some of them, I get tiny tiny little black dots sourounding the letters. I'm using my postscript driver for the printer and Adobe Acrobat 7.0.9. I'm printing a document with very small type size and it's a strain to read.

Is the PDF itself of poor quality, perhaps from a rough scan of a document?

Or are you making PDF's right out of Word, and the PDF prints worse than the Word document alone?

Can you post some samples?

The specific document I'm having this problem with at the moment is this:

http://www.thomas-distributing.com/la-c...osse-BC-900-Battery-Charger-Manual.pdf

It's an 8 page document. I downloaded it and printed it on 8½ x 11 paper and I also got a manual with the item in the mail yesterday. But the one the manufacturer supplied is printed in a horrible format. It's printed on 2½" x 4¼", with margins, so they've turned an 8 page document into a 36 page document. If I could only print that sharp on 8½ x 11 I'd be happy. The supplied manual on tiny paper has even smaller size type, but at least it's sharp.

Oddly, when I look at the PDF on my 19" LCD, the text is distorted in places. It's legible, but some lines look like something is cutting off the tops, or bottoms or sometimes the side of letters. I'm not a big fan of PDF's. They often print very slowly on my 6 MB printer, I can't copy and paste text, I have viewing and printing issues such as I'm describing here. I wonder if there are workarounds for some of these issues. I guess part of the reason they do these things is to keep people from using proprietary information, e.g. copy/paste sort of thing.

 

[Muse]

A weird thing is I just downloaded the "same" document, this time from the manufacturer's website and the file is < 1/10th the size of the other. The other is 3474 kb and the one from the manufacturer is 373 kb when I save a copy to my computer. I wonder why??

Edit: Oh, and dig this: I printed the first page of the small one (373 kb) and it's sharp, whereas the other one was fuzzy!!! What would be the explanation for this? Not only that, it prints about 10 times faster on my printer!

I'm glad I did some Googling, or I would never have guessed in a million years that I could find another PDF that would print sharp. I was hoping to find a file in some other format. Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is not all PDF's are created equal. I don't understand this stuff.

 

[wseyller]

Why would they be created equal? The content used in created the pdf is normally created within another application such as microsoft word or photoshop. If the creator used low resolution document and converted it to a pdf then it will still be low resolution.

 

[crimson117]

Originally posted by: Muse
A weird thing is I just downloaded the "same" document, this time from the manufacturer's website and the file is < 1/10th the size of the other. The other is 3474 kb and the one from the manufacturer is 373 kb when I save a copy to my computer. I wonder why??

Edit: Oh, and dig this: I printed the first page of the small one (373 kb) and it's sharp, whereas the other one was fuzzy!!! What would be the explanation for this? Not only that, it prints about 10 times faster on my printer!

The first copy you linked is basically a screenshot of text. It's stored not as letters (like atext document) but as an image of letters (like a JPG image). THat's why it's so huge - it's basically 8 pages of large JPG images.

The second copy you found - which I suspect is the true original - is much more like a word document than a JPG. It contains actual text, as opposed to a screenshot of text. That's why it's so much smaller in file size. And that's also why it's so much sharper when you print it - the printer is told the exact letters and exact font to print. With the first JPG-like document, the printer is just copying out the image. With the second, it's printing crisp, scalable letters like a word document.

 

[Matthias99]

Edit: Oh, and dig this: I printed the first page of the small one (373 kb) and it's sharp, whereas the other one was fuzzy!!! What would be the explanation for this? Not only that, it prints about 10 times faster on my printer!

The first PDF you linked is a bunch of images pasted in; probably someone scanned in the manual and turned it into a PDF that way. These don't scale real well, and often the quality is poor (and they're huge).

The second file is a 'real' PDF (made up of text, not images), so it can properly scale the text when you print it.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Edit: Oh, and dig this: I printed the first page of the small one (373 kb) and it's sharp, whereas the other one was fuzzy!!! What would be the explanation for this? Not only that, it prints about 10 times faster on my printer!

The first PDF you linked is a bunch of images pasted in; probably someone scanned in the manual and turned it into a PDF that way. These don't scale real well, and often the quality is poor (and they're huge).

The second file is a 'real' PDF (made up of text, not images), so it can properly scale the text when you print it.

I wonder why they did that. The first one was on a distributer's website. I wonder why they didn't link the proper file. Maybe there is some kind of restriction. Anyway, it appears that they scanned a copy like you say and made a PDF from that.

How is it that you determined these things? Can you analyze a PDF?

 

[crimson117]

Originally posted by: Muse
How is it that you determined these things? Can you analyze a PDF?

Maybe you can analyze it, but how I determined it was:

I know images take up more file size than text.
You can usually use the Text Select tool in Adobe Reader to select actual text, but if you try to select anything in the first document it just selects the entire page - so I can tell it's just one big image being selected.
If you try to select the text in the second document you'll see that you can, and you can even copy/paste it elsewhere.

 

[crimson117]

Another good (better) way to determine:

File -> Document Properties -> Fonts used in this document.

The first version has no fonts listed since it's just a bunch of big images.
The second one has several fonts listed, meaning it has a lot of actual text.

 

[Zepper]

It looks like the first one was perhaps an origingal manual blown up on a copy machine and then scanned in. IOW it is sure to look like crap. It is more of a graphics file than a pdf built from a word processing document. And laser printers aren't known for their graphics printing.

Just for grins, I printed out your first PDF on my Canon iP4300 and except for the images which are kind of light (I printed on standard mode not on high quality) it is quite legible (the text). Maybe your printer needs a cleaning or alignment.

.bh.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: crimson117

Originally posted by: Muse
How is it that you determined these things? Can you analyze a PDF?

Maybe you can analyze it, but how I determined it was:

I know images take up more file size than text.
You can usually use the Text Select tool in Adobe Reader to select actual text, but if you try to select anything in the first document it just selects the entire page - so I can tell it's just one big image being selected.
If you try to select the text in the second document you'll see that you can, and you can even copy/paste it elsewhere.

Very cool, thanks! I was unaware that you could select text in Acrobat. I was never able to do it when I tried, and it was one of my main gripes. As a database programmer, I love to keep text in tables (searchable!). They are playing right into my hands....:evil:

Originally posted by: crimson117
Another good (better) way to determine:

File -> Document Properties -> Fonts used in this document.

The first version has no fonts listed since it's just a bunch of big images.
The second one has several fonts listed, meaning it has a lot of actual text.

Thanks for that tip!

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Zepper
It looks like the first one was perhaps an origingal manual blown up on a copy machine and then scanned in. IOW it is sure to look like crap. It is more of a graphics file than a pdf built from a word processing document. And laser printers aren't known for their graphics printing.

Just for grins, I printed out your first PDF on my Canon iP4300 and except for the images which are kind of light (I printed on standard mode not on high quality) it is quite legible (the text). Maybe your printer needs a cleaning or alignment.

.bh.

It is quite legible (well, the text, anyway, not the graphics... see below), just not as legible as the second document. If you look really closely I think you will see the tiny dots I spoke of. If you do not, I'm amazed. Is the text really as sharp printed on your Canon printer as text from a Word document, etc.?

My problem with the first document isn't that it wasn't legible, it is that it's not as sharp and clear as the second document. There really is a world of difference at least when printed on my machine. It could be that my printer doesn't do a good a job. It's from the early 1990's, but it does such a wonderful job on text that I figured it's as good a laser printer as I'd need. It's very underfeatured compared to today's printers, but it does a lovely job on most documents. And, it's been rather reliable. I've never had it serviced and I've resolved all problems without great difficulty. I have the big manual and other support stuff and there are dozens and dozens or error codes, and there are probably ways to clear problems without turning off the machine, but 90% of the time I have a problem, I just turn it off and turn it back on and I'm set to go again.

The graphics of the first document printed from my printer are tremendously inferior to those of the second document. Sharp lines are represented as rows of dots, for instance. They are close to worthless. The second document's graphics are razor sharp!!! Some of those graphics contain text about 1/64th inch high and I can actually read it! There's some text 1/2 as high at that and I can even make that out!!

 

[Zepper]

My printout isn't fuzzy to me except for the legends on the second graphic. If I take a magnifing glass I can see the gaps in the letters, but inkjet is liquid ink and can bleed a bit to fill in the letters - quite unlike toner.

.bh.

 

[Muse]

Originally posted by: Zepper
My printout isn't fuzzy to me except for the legends on the second graphic. If I take a magnifing glass I can see the gaps in the letters, but inkjet is liquid ink and can bleed a bit to fill in the letters - quite unlike toner.

.bh.

No better way to show what I'm talking about than show some pictures:

Fuzzy 3+ MB document showing fuzzy text and especially graphics

Sharp text and graphics of the much smaller 300+ Kb PDF version

Of course, this is as printed with my HP4M postscript printer. I think you can see why I was unhappy with the first version and so very pleased with how the <400 kb PDF came out.