[Tex/LaTex] Image quality using PDFLaTeX

epstopdfgraphicspdfpdftexps2pdf

I've got some PNG images within my LaTeX document. The quality of the image files is sufficient and the result using LaTeX and viewing the resulting DVI file is quite what I expect – looks good.

But I would need such quality of the images in my PDF files as well. But unfortunately when using PDFLaTeX the images are surprisingly worse quality in the resulting PDF file.

How can the quality for the resulting PDF file be improved?

I think there's happening some kind of rasterization which makes the images showing up in bad quality.

(I tried using dvi2pdf or ps2pdf but the quality of the final PDF was the same. Additionally I would like to have a PDF ToC and the hyperref-pdf features when using PDFLaTeX)

Searching the web I found the following but I'm not quite sure if this helps and were to set the mentioned parameters on my *buntu
http://www.mackichan.com/index.html?techtalk/581.htm~mainFrame

Best Answer

I'd recommend using vector-based graphics for your images. The best format to save images in is .pdf

With programs like Inkscape, you can draw as you would in MS Paint (and do much more), and because the images are vector-based instead of pixel-based, their quality should be preserved when converting to PDF in any way.

You can also try using the TikZ to program figures directly into your LaTeX file; although it takes longer, the output will never vary during compilations and conversions.

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[Tex/LaTex] Image quality of pdf file generated from latex

Try \usepackage{lmodern}. When you switch to the T1 encoding, the only available fonts (I assume) for your distribution are the bitmap Computer Modern fonts (caveat: I'm simplifying). Loading the Latin Modern fonts will fix that — they are largely identical in appearance.

[Tex/LaTex] Good quality images in pdflatex

For diagrams you will get the best results when using vector graphics. Both gnuplot and matplotlib can export to vector graphics; file formats for vector graphics are e.g. eps or pdf or svg (there are many more).

As you are using pdfLaTeX, you should choose pdf as output format, because it will be easy to include in your document using the graphicx package and the \includegraphics{} command. To show you how to do it, I went to the matplotlib gallery and downloaded one of the many examples, saving it as myplot.pdf. The following code gives me absolutely satisfying quality.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{blindtext}

\begin{document}
\section{Introduction}
Some text and \Blindtext .
%
\begin{figure}%[!thb]
  \centering
  \includegraphics[width=0.8\linewidth]{myplot.pdf}
  \caption{The figure caption should go below the figure.}
  \label{fig:myplot}
\end{figure}
%
Some more text and \blindtext and a reference to figure~\ref{fig:myplot}.
Even more text and the end of the text.
\end{document}

PS: As discussed here, jpg is good for photos, png is good for e.g. screenshots.

Best Answer

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[Tex/LaTex] Image quality of pdf file generated from latex

[Tex/LaTex] Good quality images in pdflatex

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