Re: Distiller: resampling to 1200 (or so) dpi

In article <9c8cb07b-2f9c-4d2a-ae53-412f9595d4f6
@d27g2000prf.googlegroups.com>, jberry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx says...

I wasn't clear about it, but the documents I produce are books, and no
images, no halftones, are involved. There are raster (bitmap) fonts
and their placement on the pages. A 300+ page book is a PDF of < 4
MB. The fonts are not standard fonts. They have no scalable (Adobe
or TT) equivalents.

PostScript and PDF both handle bitmap font data, though possibly not in
the format you are using. However, that's usually handled by the page
layout application.

How did you create the '300 dpi' bitmaps to make the PDF file, is there
no way you could alter that from your source application ?


I'd like to upscale the fonts (using the best possible resampling) and
to have the PDF file rework the positioning of the "letters" on the
page to the new upscaled dpi. This seems conceptually the best
solution. Is there software that does that?

Well again I'm puzzled. Are you saying that each letter is a single
image, individually positioned, or the whole page is a single image ?

If each letter is a single image, then we're rather back to the 'you
don't need to do that' stage.

PDF and PostScript have a 'user space' which is independent of the
device. All co-ordinates are expressed in user space, and mapped to
resolution-dependent device space when printing.

So, if you have an image, which has insufficient samples for the
resolution of the output device, then the PDF/PostScript interpreter
will scale up the image by replicating some of the pixels.

It doesn't matter whether this is a single image, or lots of
individually placed single images (text). The position of each is
absolute so they will appear in the correct place. The quality of the
resizing may not be as good as you would get by using a decent
application, but it should be 'correct', ie properly sized and placed.


The idea of upscaling a TIFF image does also give a way forward. I
wonder what the best filter is for upscaling bitmaps? The ones that I
tried, produced jagged results.

Depends what you want to see. If you try to maintain a monochrome image,
then there is no choice but to simply replicate pixels, which will
result in some jaggedness.

You could convert the images to grayscale. Failing that you will get
jagged edges, because the algorithm can't deal with vector data. That's
why vector-based fonts are better...

However I would have thought Photoop would do a decent enough job.

For more investment (time and probably money) you could convert the
images to linework by tracing the outlines (there are tools for this).
This would give you a fully scalable output which could be converted
back to PDF.


With a good filter, the downsides
appear to be the processing time, possible handling of multiple pages,
and file size.

If you increase the effective resolution of an image, it *will* get
bigger, because it contains more data...

For large files you need to set up an automated workflow. Most image
manipulation tools will allow some kind of external scripting. You
should be able to convert the PDF pages to TIFF files, rescale the TIFF
and export back to multipple PDF files. All you need to do then is
stitch the pages back together.


The commercial printers said that yes, TIFF will produce exactly the
same results as PDF, but with more work, i.e., more expensive.

You can always convert the TIFF images back to PDF, if your printer
thinks that's better :-)


Ken
.

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