Re: trouble printing to PDF
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg118322] Re: trouble printing to PDF
- From: "E. Martin-Serrano" <eMartinSerrano at telefonica.net>
- Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2011 03:13:23 -0400 (EDT)
Thanks John, See my comments below. -----Mensaje original----- De: John Fultz [mailto:jfultz at wolfram.com] Enviado el: mi=E9rcoles, 20 de abril de 2011 10:30 Para: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net Asunto: [mg118296] Re: trouble printing to PDF >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. I suppose this first paragraph is about what I called in my post "PDF page overflow". But, I was not complaining about a (pretended) intrinsic problem to print or dump notebooks to PDF files; what I had in mind when posting was that, perhaps, the way to configure the "Mathematica printer" to PDF is not clear at all for me, though it is true that I did not make it explicit. I must reckon that I am very bad or perhaps very reluctant at dealing with the Option Inspector and I hardly ever modify any "factory made" setting; just in case. However, in fact, the commented problem can be extended to printing notebooks to physical printers too. Anyway I was not complaining but just wondering. Perhaps I am doing something wrong. >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. Understood; but, the problem is probably worse than the mere different appearance of the mentioned items (sliders, manipulators, panels, ...), which is very noticeable in any case (always talking about PDFs): the difference is big and in addition the info in the input/output fields associated to those objects looks displaced from its expected position and partially hidden. If you want I can send you a PDF plus the original notebook picture and a Windows7 cut and pasted picture from the notebook original picture; the three pieces together are very illustrative, and you will see that the result, as it looks there, is pretty strange. So you can judge if the issue deserves to be forwarded to the Technical Support. I insist in what I said above: I was just wondering, however I have tried several versions of the picture with the same result. >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. Not. I am not suggesting that plots in Manipulate are inferior. I am saying that just, if dumped to PDF, "my" otherwise fine background and frame lines of plots as inserted in "my" panels appear in the reddish color that one gests when the plot is badly defined and an error is returned by Mathematica. On the other hand, I rarely use Manipulate except for very simple examples, and I do not remember having dumped them to PDF. > 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?