Ugly PDF Image Quality Drop in Flare 4.2 (SOLVED)

[beagley]

Has anyone else noticed a dramatic drop in image quality from Flare 4 to Flare 4.2?

I thought I was imagining things, until I found a Flare compiled PDF from before I updated.

Here's a "before" and "after" screenshot (4 to 4.2) of the same Flare PDF, blown up to 120%:



Both are put into the topic with no scaling, though I'm guessing Flare's PDF compiler somehow opens and scales and re-saves the image. Here's a more pronounced example (this time from a PNG in the Flare topic to a PDF made by Flare 4.2):



This is pretty darn yucky. I'm going to submit it as a bug/wishlist, but please: If anyone knows a work-around, or a way to tweak how Flare manipulates images during PDF compiling, let me know!

I shoot in PNGs for a reason... so I won't have to deal with the artifacts that JPGs create. I wish there were a quality slider-- or just someway to tell Flare not to fiddle with the images so much.

Edit: Submitted Bug
-d

[DocuWil]

Did you try the Media setting (CTRL+ALT+B) where you can set e.g. the Width to a value you want and the Height to Automatic?
I checked it with my test project (just for these kind of things) and it works fine.
As far as I know with the Automatic setting, the resolution will be taken into account. And resolution is the keyword here.

[doc_guy]

From what I can tell, Flare 4.2 was able to dramatically reduce file sizes by changing the way it handles images. So, I wonder if what you are seeing is an artifact of that process of making the PDF smaller.

For example, when I created a PDF in Flare 4.1, it was about 25 MB in size. Now that same PDF creates at under 5 MB.

To some degree, I'm willing to sacrifice image quality for overall document size, but only to a certain point. I wonder if a feature request that let's you choose how much to reduce images in PDF output would be nice. Then those who are actually going to print with the PDF can select the highest quality, and those that are going to Web with the PDF can select a lower size. (Kind of like you get from Photoshop when you save a JPG image.)

[SarahW]

We recently upgraded to 4.2 and our PDF file sizes has increased substantially - so much so that I thought I had grabbed the wrong files/images from our source code tool. However, I double-checked what I was doing and it's not a user error in this instance. Also, we haven't changed any of the project options/way we've done things (Flare to PDF).

So, what am I missing?

Sarah

[KevinDAmery]

To some degree, I'm willing to sacrifice image quality for overall document size, but only to a certain point. I wonder if a feature request that let's you choose how much to reduce images in PDF output would be nice. Then those who are actually going to print with the PDF can select the highest quality, and those that are going to Web with the PDF can select a lower size. (Kind of like you get from Photoshop when you save a JPG image.)

I already put one in like that a while back. (Ok, it was actually prompted by the lack of security settings, but basically I asked for as much control over the PDF creation settings as you get in Acrobat Pro so I think it should cover image quality too ) But as always, the more the merrier....

[beagley]

Did you try the Media setting (CTRL+ALT+B) where you can set e.g. the Width to a value you want and the Height to Automatic?
As far as I know with the Automatic setting, the resolution will be taken into account. And resolution is the keyword here.

Thanks for the idea... but it looks like those options are just a short cut for overriding what the stylesheet does, on a per-image basis. Nothing fancy or cool for overriding how the PDF compresses images.

I was kinda hoping someone had some magic stylesheet setting I had missed that would force Flare to not do all the image compression (that seems to be creating the artifacts). Like creating a workaround or a custom image class in the stylesheet that would cause Flare to leave it alone... but I'm probably dreaming.

[KevinDAmery]

Thing to remember is that while this is version 4.2 of Flare it's basically 1.2 of direct-to-PDF output. So there's still a lot of stuff in there that has some growing up to do.

As has been mentioned before, the best thing to do is submit a report on everything you find that isn't up to the standards you expect. Madcap is very good about fixing things, but they need to know what you want--otherwise they have to guess (which with developers can be dangerous....)

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/bugs/submit.aspx

[SarahW]

Yup - I submitted an enhancement not too long after I posted this. Just didn't include that info.

Thanks,

Sarah

[beagley]

From what I can tell, Flare 4.2 was able to dramatically reduce file sizes by changing the way it handles images. So, I wonder if what you are seeing is an artifact of that process of making the PDF smaller. ...To some degree, I'm willing to sacrifice image quality for overall document size, but only to a certain point...

Well said, doc_guy.

I think that's probably exactly what's going on.

Playing armchair Programmer here, again: I think this is a little short-sighted of MadCap, as many people use Flare for documenting software, which includes a lot of screenshots and line graphics, which are notoriously hurt by compression (which is why everyone uses PNG or GIF for screenshots and not JPGs).

I guess some people still have to worry about bandwidth... for a few more years, anyway. But in that case, they should give us the power to dial-up or dial-down image quality on our own. My PDFs look pretty darn yucky, now. (It doesn't help that my designers color choices, as shown above in my second example, probably aggravate the problem by using poor contrast.)

I have this sneaky suspicion that Flare is converting all of my images to the hated JPG before assembling the PDF. Sure looks like it. Egads!

Anyway, I've submitted a request/bug report. (with a link to my images, even.) Maybe my violin will trigger some sympathy.

[NorthEast]

Yep, I've noticed this too, the quality of images in the PDF is absolutely terrible.
I use very simple graphic bullets in my project and they come out looking awful.

As a test, I tried generating PDFs using Acrobat (from IE and Word), with all the downsampling options switched on and the image quality set to low. It still looked miles better than the equivalent output from Flare.

[DocuWil]

Did you try the Media setting (CTRL+ALT+B) where you can set e.g. the Width to a value you want and the Height to Automatic?
I checked it with my test project (just for these kind of things) and it works fine.
As far as I know with the Automatic setting, the resolution will be taken into account. And resolution is the keyword here.

Here I used this in my test project (the PDF was displaying 100%):
(Sorry for the big pictures)

flarelogo1.jpg

Enlarged:

flarelogo2.jpg

As you see, I have no problems

[beagley]

Hey all,
I received a bug update to this problem.

Madcap has released a patch that fixes this problem! (at least for me)

Here's an image from my InsuranceBilling.pdf,
before and after the patch:



Yay!

The patch is public and available (with installation instructions) here:

http://kb.madcapsoftware.com/default_CSH.htm#PATF4PDF

BTW: Anyone searching for this topic far in the future shouldn't have to worry, as I'm sure everything after Flare 4.2 will probably have even better image controls.