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Resolved Poor PDF quality for images

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  1. Gerry Whitmarsh
    Gerry Whitmarsh
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. Saturday, 1 July 2017 12:05 PM UTC

Hi,

Firstly, let me say my 12.6 application converted perfectly and ran at first go:-) But, as my main reason to upgrade was for W10 compatibility and native PDF I am disappointed with the native PDF.

The quality of the native PDF for datawindows images is extremely poor (unusable). Is there an option to increase the quality? Also, is it possible, programmatically, to append datawindows so as to create one PDF from several datawindows? I do this presently in PB 12.6 by creating a print job and using a 3rd party printer driver.

Thanks,

Gerry.

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Mike S
Mike S Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Saturday, 1 July 2017 14:41 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 1

the quality seems fine to me.  i loaded up a 5MB JPG hi resolution photo from a DSLR camera to a dw.

saved to pdf using the new pdf.  it saved it full color and looks really good - as good as looking at the jpg.  (i'm using a surface pro which has a really high resolution screen).  I did not size it to the full size of paper,   i also did not print either of them for comparison.

the PDF size is 265KB, so i believe there may be some loss in the compression.

can you post examples of native vs the 3rd party ones?

 

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Gbenga Owolabi
  1. Gbenga Owolabi
  2. Sunday, 2 July 2017 03:01 AM UTC
Seriously I was also disappointed just as Gerry said. Maybe Mike's works for images. You may as well try saveAs method on a text on document with some bold captions using distill and NativePdf. The quality comes out better uisng Distill (Ghostscript) than that of the NativePdf method. I wish i could attach a sample.

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Gerry Whitmarsh
  1. Gerry Whitmarsh
  2. Sunday, 2 July 2017 06:56 AM UTC
Hi,



thanks for the reply. How do I post a couple of PDFs please? I can't see how to do it.



Thank you.

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Chris Pollach @Appeon
Chris Pollach @Appeon Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Saturday, 1 July 2017 18:31 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 2

Hi Gerry;

  Like Mike posted back already ... I am not seeing any degradation in my PDF file outputs from native vs GS. You seem to be using some special print drivers for you application - so that may be where the quality difference might lay.

  There are many free utilities that can be called from your PB Apps to merge separete PDF files into one ... here are a few examples.

FWIW: I use the free PDF Toolkit software with my Apps.

HTH

Regards ... Chris

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Mike S
Mike S Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Saturday, 1 July 2017 20:31 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 3

i use amyuni for pdf generation in PB 12.51.  I tried the same exact JPG using the amyuni in PB 12.51 vs native in PB 2017.  It appears that amyuni is putting the jpg in the pdf at much higher resolution (resolution from the original jpg ) than native pdf.  at a 800% zoom level you can definitely see the difference.

the file size difference is huge - native is around 260K vs 37MB for amyuni.  much longer save time in amyuni too (this is an older version of it however).

 

 

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Gbenga Owolabi
  1. Gbenga Owolabi
  2. Sunday, 2 July 2017 03:14 AM UTC
Yes the pdf file comes out larger for GS using distill method with retained quality as on the datawindow. The issue with nativepdf is that there is no output quality setting anywhere. It tends to focus more on the pdf size trading with the quality.  Size and quality options should be provided to create a balance and also match what is required per time.

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Andreas Mykonios
  1. Andreas Mykonios
  2. Monday, 3 July 2017 14:08 PM UTC
Hi Mike.



In the release Bulletin for Powerbuilder 2017 the following are mentioned:



Known issues for the new SaveAs PDF method



The new SaveAs PDF method (NativePDF! using PDFLib) has a few issues when handling images or lines:









When the image of the Picture control is saved to the PDF file using PDFLib, the image will lose some quality because PDFLib saves images as bitmaps.





The pen width property of the Line control takes no affect in the new SaveAs PDF method. No matter what value is set for this property, 1 is always used.









https://www.appeon.com/support/documents/appeon_online_help/pb2017/release_bulletin_for_pb/ch02s04.html



So I guess there are some "restrictions" with the native pdf creation. Personally I haven't testes yet. I'm still evaluating the new version.

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Chris Pollach @Appeon
Chris Pollach @Appeon Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Tuesday, 4 July 2017 02:41 AM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 4

PS: Note, you can also force the Internal PDF feature to save the fonts in the PDF feature by setting a PB.ini value. You can read more about this in the new PB 2017 Help information. That might help with PDF's that require higher font resolution.

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Gerry Whitmarsh
  1. Gerry Whitmarsh
  2. Tuesday, 4 July 2017 12:24 PM UTC
Hi Chris, thanks for the reply.



I already tried that, but it only affects fonts and creates larger files. It already creates files twice as large as those from PDFCreator which I currently use. Text is fine, it's the images that are the problem. Shame, I was looking forward to ditching 3rd party tools. 



I have just seen that loss of quality is a known issue due to the built-in 3rd party library PDFLib. I assume (hope) that this will be rectified in the Nnear) future.



 

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Mike S
Mike S Accepted Answer Pending Moderation
  1. Tuesday, 1 August 2017 22:36 PM UTC
  2. PowerBuilder
  3. # 5

My first try with this was with a high-res (native) photo and the reduced quality still looked great in a pdf.

I now tried with more of a standard image (logo) which is of a fairly low resolution natively.  Using amyuni, it looks great but the 'natiive' pdf reduced the quality of an already low resolution image to the point of it looking pretty bad / unusable.

I also have a 2nd issue of it sizing incorrectly - a printed report is 1 page, an amyuni pdf is 1 page, native puts it on 2 pages because the image is too wide.  It is either the margins are too wide, or possibly that the datawindow is somewhat zoomed in making it too wide for 1 page.

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