T
TommyC
I just downloaded and installed cutepdf on my Windows 98 machine. In
some ways, it's an easier-to-use improvement on what I'd been using for
that purpose, freepdf (essentially a series of files that integrates
ghostscript into things and allows a Windows application to dump to
postscript, then to a file that is readable by Acrobat Reader).
But I'm curious about why my output is so, well, icky.
I have a 26-page Word file, all Verdana text, no graphics of any kind.
It's about 110k in size.
In my first attempt to print it using cutepdf, I got a 130k pdf file.
Reasonably compact; I was happy. But then I looked at it and was
displeased. The typeface wasn't verdana and the text was obviously
different from the original. Also, horizontal lines in some tables I'd
used looked fatter in some places than others, instead of being clearly
uniform width as they were in the Word document.
When I right-clicked on the properties of the cutepdf "printer" I
noticed that the true type fonts was not selected, so I picked that and
ran it again.
The resulting file ballooned to over 2 megabytes! Ick. At least the
font was kind of arguably verdana though.
But I did a test. I printed a page from the original Word file, the
same page from the 130k pdf, and the same page from the 2 meg pdf.
The Word printout was beautiful. Evenly-spaced crisp text, bolded print
really jumped off the page, even in 8-point type.
The smaller pdf looked horrible - as I said, the font wasn't even close.
The huge pdf wasn't that good either though. Even without comparing to
the Word original, it looked blurry. When I did compare the two, the
pdf looked even worse.
So I'm looking for tips to fine-tune my copy of cutepdf. I've yet to
achieve an output that looked even close in quality to the original Word
file, and there's no way I want to increase file size by almost 20fold
just to turn it into a pdf.
I'm not a computer guru, but I'm not afraid to follow step-by-step
instructions to make adjustments. Will appreciate any tips.
some ways, it's an easier-to-use improvement on what I'd been using for
that purpose, freepdf (essentially a series of files that integrates
ghostscript into things and allows a Windows application to dump to
postscript, then to a file that is readable by Acrobat Reader).
But I'm curious about why my output is so, well, icky.
I have a 26-page Word file, all Verdana text, no graphics of any kind.
It's about 110k in size.
In my first attempt to print it using cutepdf, I got a 130k pdf file.
Reasonably compact; I was happy. But then I looked at it and was
displeased. The typeface wasn't verdana and the text was obviously
different from the original. Also, horizontal lines in some tables I'd
used looked fatter in some places than others, instead of being clearly
uniform width as they were in the Word document.
When I right-clicked on the properties of the cutepdf "printer" I
noticed that the true type fonts was not selected, so I picked that and
ran it again.
The resulting file ballooned to over 2 megabytes! Ick. At least the
font was kind of arguably verdana though.
But I did a test. I printed a page from the original Word file, the
same page from the 130k pdf, and the same page from the 2 meg pdf.
The Word printout was beautiful. Evenly-spaced crisp text, bolded print
really jumped off the page, even in 8-point type.
The smaller pdf looked horrible - as I said, the font wasn't even close.
The huge pdf wasn't that good either though. Even without comparing to
the Word original, it looked blurry. When I did compare the two, the
pdf looked even worse.
So I'm looking for tips to fine-tune my copy of cutepdf. I've yet to
achieve an output that looked even close in quality to the original Word
file, and there's no way I want to increase file size by almost 20fold
just to turn it into a pdf.
I'm not a computer guru, but I'm not afraid to follow step-by-step
instructions to make adjustments. Will appreciate any tips.