fuzzy graphics

[Aaron Shepard]

I wonder if anyone in this group has noticed that Word 2004 is
automatically antialiasing all imported pictures, without any control
by the user. Word for Windows does not do this, and neither did OS 9
versions of Mac Word. Word 2004 even converts black-and-white pictures
to grayscale in order to antialias them. (Magnify the picture on screen
to see all this.) It also reduces all imported pictures to 300 dpi if
they're over that.

My best guess is that antialiasing was introduced to improve the
appearance of low-resolution Web graphics. But for high-resolution
pictures meant for print, it simply makes the graphic look fuzzy. This
is especially noticeable in geometric line art, such as charts or
graphs, because line and text edges print out as bumpy instead of
smooth. (You can use a magnifier to see the bumps, but you don't need
one to see the fuzziness.) You simply can't use such line art in Word
2004 at all and expect decent results. And all high-quality pictures
are compromised to some extent.

Luckily, there's one workaround. Word 2004 will not antialias or reduce
EPS images. You can even insert a CMYK image in this way! Using the EPS
format seems to be the ONLY way to preserve the quality of pictures
imported into Word 2004. And that's a scandal!

Aaron

Aaron Shepard
Author, _Perfect Pages: Publishing with Microsoft Word_
http://www.aaronshep.com/publishing

 

[Ritika Pathak [MSFT]]

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for sending this issue.

I have forwarded it to the Graphics tester and you should hear from him
soon.

Thanks,
Ritika [MSFT]
MacWord test,
Mac Business Unit, Microsoft

 

[JosypenkoMJ]

I wonder if anyone in this group has noticed that Word 2004 is
automatically antialiasing all imported pictures, without any control
by the user. Word for Windows does not do this, and neither did OS 9
versions of Mac Word. Word 2004 even converts black-and-white pictures
to grayscale in order to antialias them. (Magnify the picture on screen
to see all this.) It also reduces all imported pictures to 300 dpi if
they're over that.

My best guess is that antialiasing was introduced to improve the
appearance of low-resolution Web graphics. But for high-resolution
pictures meant for print, it simply makes the graphic look fuzzy. This
is especially noticeable in geometric line art, such as charts or
graphs, becau se line and text edges print out as bumpy instead of
smooth. (You can use a magnifier to see the bumps, but you don't need
one to see the fuzziness.) You simply can't use such line art in Word
2004 at all and expect decent results. And all high-qual ity pictures
are compromised to some extent.

Luckily, there's one workaround. Word 2004 will not antialias or reduce
EPS images. You can even insert a CMYK image in this way! Using the EPS
format seems to be the ONLY way to preserve the quality of pictures
imported into Word 2004. And that's a scandal!

Aaron

Aaron Shepard
Author, _Perfect Pages: Publishing with Microsoft Word_
http://www.aaronshep.com/publishing

Likewise, I've been having problems with printing high res. pictures :

- .5 MB, 20:1 compression .jpgs in Word look ok magnified on the
screen, but print fuzzy (OS 9.2.2, OS 10._)
- 300 dpi .pict pictures in Word print fuzzier than 72 dpi .pict
pictures in Word (OS 9.2.2). This makes no sense.

Is there a fix ?V

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

The only fix I am aware of is to use EPS.

But you need to take care what you make an EPS from. If you simply take a
screen-shot and make an EPS from it, what you now have in the document is a
72 dpi bitmap encapsulated as a postscript file. Making an EPS out of
something doesn't add bits that weren't there already, it simply wraps the
existing picture in a PostScript header.

So anything done as a raster (bmp, tiff, png, jpeg...) is going to resample,
and when it resamples, it's going to look fairly horrid. On PC Word you can
crank the resolution way up, and if you do, bitmaps will print OK.

Print industry professionals get the resolution VERY high: 900 dpi or above.
These will print OK, but you need VERY serious hardware to handle a document
full of them. Many commercial office printers will fall in a heap if you
hit them with a full-page bitmap at 900 dpi. A full page TIFF at 4800 dpi
is over 500 megabytes. There are very few computers that will get a Word
document open if it exceeds 2 GB in total.

But Aaron's point was that Office:mac appears to resample ANY raster graphic
to 72 dpi. If it does, that will print like sandpaper...

If you make an EPS from an Illustrator picture, internally it's .ai format,
which is a set of mathematical formulae that have "no" resolution. The
printer will make up the print image for such a picture at whatever its
maximum native resolution is, and it will look as sharp as text does on that
printer.

If the picture is "complex" (lots of layers, lots of colours, lots of
gradient fills...) be prepared to "wait" while the printer does this. I
have seen a laser printer succeed in printing such a picture after spending
20 minutes making up a single page. And plenty that have failed after
struggling for more than an hour. If the printer doesn't have enough memory
in it, no matter how long it tries there's a limit to how complex an image
it can render.

Hope this helps

Likewise, I've been having problems with printing high res. pictures :

- .5 MB, 20:1 compression .jpgs in Word look ok magnified on the
screen, but print fuzzy (OS 9.2.2, OS 10._)
- 300 dpi .pict pictures in Word print fuzzier than 72 dpi .pict
pictures in Word (OS 9.2.2). This makes no sense.

Is there a fix ?V

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410