bitmap pattern to pdf

[EJ]

OK. This seems like it should be simple.

1. I create a circle with no fill.
2. I fill it with horizontal lines which I have imported as a bitmap pattern (a bmp file).
3. Set File/Page options/View/Bitmaps to "never smooth".
4. Result beautiful. Circle is smooth and lines are smooth-just what I want.
5. Make pdf using Primo (Jaws does the same).
6. Result horrible. Lines are smooth but the circle has turned to the jaggies.
7. How to get both circle and lines to maintain smoothness in pdf?

Any thoughts most welcome
Erik

[diniel]

Draw two horizontal lines in Xara, blend between the two, then apply as a clipview to your shape?

If the clipview doesn't export well, you could intersect shapes - but that result wouldn't be so editable in Xara later on.

Example .xar

[Egg Bramhill]

Erik
When you export to Primo, what dpi are you setting it to?
Egg

[Albacore]

Hi EJ,
The way Daniel has demonstrated printing to PDF works well and you should have no problems achieving the patterned circle. Have a look at the example Xara drawing.

[John Rayner]

Hi Erik,

I would do as Egg hinted and increase the DPI. 96 DPI looks bad zoomed in and in print. 192 looks bad on screen but is readable from a desktop printer. 300 DPI looks good both screen and print, file size is huge. 1200DPI looks great, but you need a wagon to haul around all the floppies you would need to put it on disk.

[EJ]

Hi people,
thank you for the replies. Daniel your tutorial worked like a dream. The resultant pdf is crisp. Problem solved.
Thanks again. Erik

[diniel]

Pleased it worked EJ.

In case anyone finds this topic in the future, apologies if the link is broken - at the time I posted my message, the forum wasn't accepting attachments so I hosted the file myself.

Of course, you'd need not have worried about aligning the lines to the grid on whole numbers as I originally said - that would only be necessary for a crisp bitmap export (habit for me - always exporting images for use on a website).

Outputting to vector formats like PDF wouldn't need the grid lining up like that because it wouldn't matter if your line was on a whole number of pixels or not.