Documentation in pdf format

[Cristian Marchi]

Il 26/11/2010 12:21, Geert Janssens ha scritto:
>
> For good print results the more image detail available the better. Our on-
> screen process limits images to 510 pixels for comfortable viewing on small
> screens. For this reason, many screenshot are resized to fit this 510 pixel
> constraint. This means the images are also resized before they are put into
> pdf, or in other words they have less image detail than they could have, which
> reduces the print quality.
>
> So I would propose to no longer resize the original screenshots in the
> documentation source, but do the resizing only as part of the on-screen (html)
> output production when needed. This can be easily done with forementioned
> imagemagick.
>
> This would give us the best in both worlds: better quality images for pdf and
> images that still fit the limited space requirements in html.
>    
Totally agree on this. I don't know how for example the gnome help 
maximum width of 510px will be handled.

> We'd have to double-check if this added dependency is ok on all platforms of
> course. I know it's is readily available on all distributions, and there is a
> Windows binary we can download straight away. There is also a macports binary
> available on OSX, but I'm not sure if that would be sufficient for John's
> native Quartz build or the fink build. But I found that on OS X the native
> command line utility sips [1] could be used to achieve the same thing.
>
>    
>> So we need only to choose in what dimension print images in PDF and set
>> a ppi to all figures.
>>
>>      
>  From an unrelated project I did yesterday in Scribus, I learned that Scribus
> issues a warning if the resolution of images is less that 144dpi when
> exporting to pdf. So apparently, 144dpi is some generally accepted minimum to
> have a decent print quality. I propose to use that as ppi voor all images that
> don't have a higher ppi set already.
>
>    
Generally I heard that one of the most used dpi is 300. But that will 
probably give too small images in pdf. So I think that 144dpi could be a 
starting point. I will experiment with this setting and eventually I 
will update all the images in guide and help if you agree.

Regards
Cristian