Re: trouble printing to PDF
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg118296] Re: trouble printing to PDF
- From: John Fultz <jfultz at wolfram.com>
- Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2011 04:29:49 -0400 (EDT)
As a general rule, I'll say examples are good! We do testing in-house, of
course, but it's not always going to represent the same sort of content which
you use, and if you have problems, you should definitely be sending explicit
examples to technical support. If we don't know about the issues, it's not
nearly so likely that we'll actually fix them.
But I have a little more to say about the issues raised in this particular post.
Yes, it is true that elements like Panel, Manipulator, Slider, etc., look
different when exported to PDF as opposed to exported to, e.g., GIF. There is,
in fact, a very good reason for that.
When we draw controls onscreen, we get the operating system to do it for us.
That way, we get controls that look exactly like the native window system
controls. In this way, we don't suffer the problems that you see in some
compatibility toolkits (which you used to see in Java programs, for example) of
having controls that look very unnatural.
The problem is, we can only get the system to draw these controls at the
resolution of the screen. Which is fine for exporting raster formats, but
causes problems when you're exporting to a vector format like PDF, or to a much
higher resolution device like a printer.
So, for printing and exporting to PDF, we have an alternative "generic" set of
control appearances. They don't look as pretty as most of the
platform-dependent appearances, but they're absolutely resolution independent.
Now, if you're suggesting that plots inside of a Manipulate are somehow
inferior...I certainly wouldn't expect that, and that's an issue we should
discuss further. But, while we could pretty up the generic controls further,
the controls will always have some sort of different appearance until the
windowing systems out there give us the ability to draw them at arbitrary
resolutions.
Sincerely,
John Fultz
jfultz at wolfram.com
User Interface Group
Wolfram Research, Inc.
On Tue, 19 Apr 2011 06:56:19 -0400 (EDT), E. Martin-Serrano wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was never able to print properly notebooks to PDF. The typical problem
> I encountered were PDF page overflow (a notebook page -either letter or
> A4 size- printed on several PDF pages and/or poor printing quality).
>
> Recently I am using the "FILE -> SAVE SELECTION AS" menu command to
> print graphics from selected cells, and that problem remains despite I
> try to fit the actual size of the graphics to the PDF standard page size
> (A4, letter or whatever). Moreover, some parts of the pictures printed on
> a PDF page differs in quality, among them, within the same graphic unit.
> On PDF pages, those parts of the picture generated with "Graphics"
> primitives like "Plot", etc. look notably different than those generated
> with "Manipulator" and "Slider"; this applies even to the frames
> surrounding these parts (Panel/Framed), and this includes the colors of
> the frames, both, for background and lines. Of course, there is not such
> a difference on the monitor screen, neither on the same pictures, if
> saved as "JPG", "GIF", etc. However, the overall quality of the pictures
> saved on "JPG", "GIF", "TIFF" files is poor compared to that in PDF. In
> summary, those Mathematica pictures ("pictures", said to distinguish
> programmable "Graphics" from build in graphics as "Manipulators") got
> from selected cells and saved as graphic format files render general poor
> quality compared to the same parts on the PDF, but other parts on PDF
> pictures (Manipulators and the like) render even poorer quality in PDF
> than the same in the standard graphic format files.
>
> Besides, notebook graphics both dumped to PDF and "JPG", "TIFF" look like
> as if they had been generated in error (showing background colors changed
> to reddish).
>
> Curiously, if I cut the picture from the notebook by using the cut tool
> in Windows 7 and then save the clipboard content on, say, a JPG file,
> then the quality of the cut and saved picture looks almost identical than
> that in the (V8) notebook. It could mean that the problem is not in
> Windows 7 itself.
>
>
> E. Martin-Serrano
>
>
> -----Mensaje original-----
> De: sibir [mailto:martin.rommel at gmail.com]
> Enviado el: viernes, 15 de abril de 2011 9:57
> Para: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
> Asunto: [mg118174] trouble printing to PDF
>
> Already with version 7 I was not able to reliably print to the Adobe PDF
> "printer" under Windows XP. Now I run version 8 under Windows 7 with
> Acrobat 9 Standard and the problems continue. Just tried freeware
> PDFCreator and it also renders Mathematica unresponsive.
>
> What is going on? Am I the only one? Is there a work-around?