pdf to jpg problem

[gwpriester]

Steveward and all

I wonder if this is not in part the old resolution thing?

Adobe has traditionally used the Mac 72dpi screen resolution as the default and Windows is 96dpi.

I'm not sure where you go from here but I suspect this could be the reason why Photoshop and Illustrator can create a sharper image.

Gary

[steveward]

Well I have to say, this is all interesting, but if you want to save the PDF image to a JPG you simply could use the Adobe Reader 'snapshot' tool which copies the captured area to the clipboard. Open up dear 'ol Paintbrush, Edit->Paste, then save as .png (or .jpg if you must)

Sledger, I did try that, but I ended up with an unsatisfactory .jpg, .gif, and .png. (I guess I should have said something sooner - sorry.) If you were successful in creating an image as nice as the Photoshop .jpg in my first post, please post it.

Unless you want to edit the PDF, there's no reason to open it in Xara simply to save a raster version.

There is a reason if Acrobat can't give you satisfactory results.

Luciano, that's definitely a step in the right direction and better than anything I could create outside of Photoshop and Illustrator. Thanks for posting that.

Gary, you may be on to something there. Time for more experimenting.

- Steve

[steve.ledger]

If you were successful in creating an image as nice as the Photoshop .jpg in my first post, please post it.

Yes I was, though I prefer PNG for anything other than photographs - see below.
1. Captured while viewing your PDF with Adobe Reader 8.1
2. Captured while viewing with Foxit Reader (Freeware) - which stretched the image slightly until I changed the snapshot res' prefs to 96 from 72.
You can also set the display resolution from within Adobe Reader preferrences.
(This is what Gary was suggesting I believe - though for me changing the display res in Adobe Reader / Foxit prefs did not produce jaggy results, only a display size difference)

There is a reason if Acrobat can't give you satisfactory results.

Yes I can understand this if you need to edit the PDF as a vector, I'm just not getting why a screenshot saved as a raster from viewing the PDF in Adobe Reader isn't a simpler option?

[steveward]

...but if you want to save the PDF image to a JPG you simply could use the Adobe Reader 'snapshot' tool which copies the captured area to the clipboard.

I misunderstood the above quote as the Edit > Copy File to Clipboard command in Acrobat, which produces a totally different pasted image than the Snapshot tool. My apologies for the misunderstanding. The Snapshot Tool in Acrobat does a satisfactory job of saving the sample pdf to a suitable raster format. (Although when Acrobat's Snapshot tool was performed on the much bigger pdf map that the sample pdf came from, the text in the resulting png file was sharp but a bit bolder than the image of the same size produced out of Photoshop/Illustrator.)

Thanks to Sledger and everyone else who helped me figure this out.

- Steve