I still don't buy that. You send a printer a PDF. That is a vector graphic document. You send it to them in a PDF so it prints exactly what you give them. Yes, professional printers are different than home printers. They are far more complex and yes, I did have a problem with converting from RGB to CMYK which was their huge problem. I have never heard of a printer rejecting a vector based image. They crave these things because no matter the resolution or size, it will always print out beautifully. The printer doesn't know or care about what your picture means or represents. What the printer cares about is that they print exactly what you gave them. It should look exactly the same on the screen (apart from color because RGB -> CMYK is not even sort of possible to do well). If you hand them a 8.5x11 piece of paper with your plot on it in a PDF form and you open that form in Adobe, they should easily print out exactly that image that you see on the screen. In all seriousness, if they cannot do that, you might try to find a new printer. It shouldn't matter what format the image is in. Vector based graphics are how printers print. It converts your bitmap into a PS image and the printer uses a modified PS file to print your image on the paper. This is why I am so incredibly confused by all of this. Not only that, Adobe makes all of the products that printers use. InDesign hooks up to the highest end HP machines you have ever seen and uses their own custom layout crap to send your document to the printer. Bitmaps should never be used in professional printing, ever.
If they have a grievous conversion fault, it is on the printer to make whatever software they are using print whatever image you give them and have that image look the same on paper as it does in the document. That is their only job. Easier said than done but I don't buy that printers don't know how to convert or deal with vector based images. I actually finished up a massive job with a small printer about 3 months ago and have way more experience than I should with this. Their flattening tool didn't take to my document so I had to convert everything manually to CMYK to make sure that the colors and images printed correctly. Thankfully, image magic does vector based color transformations quite well. Their PDF -> PNG transformation is horrible but a PDF (RGB) -> PDF (CMYK) is actually quite good. It isn't perfect because that transformation cannot be done exactly, but it does do a decent job. I really don't mean to harp on this like I have been but really, it is the job of your printer to make whatever you gave them work and there should be no problem printing out vector images. ~Ben On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 11:25 AM, Helge Hafting <helge.haft...@hist.no> wrote: > On 23. juni 2014 11:16, Christian W wrote: > >> The document contains a larger number of images. As these are results from >> scientific computations, they contain a large number of details. This >> allows >> the user to zoom deep into the image when viewing the document on screen. >> However, in the printed version it is obviously not possible to resolve so >> many details. The publisher claims this may result in unexpected >> appearance >> of the images during the printing process. I am not sure about the >> technical >> reasons and differences of book printing to regular home printers, but he >> asked me to provide bitmap based graphics instead. >> > > Too fine detail will be lost - that is obvious. The interesting part is > how. If a single pixel contains some white and some black due to fine > detail - what should happen? Black pixel? White? Gray pixel? (Gray might > not be possible). And when many such pixels make up a region - will the > whole region be white/black? Or a dithering pattern? Aliasing effects? > > Their press might do this reduction a bit different than your home > printer, hence the warning about surprises. They are publishers, not > experts in your field. So they might not understand your computed images. > So they cannot tell a "bad" conversion form a "good" one. which is why they > tell you to make bitmaps in the native resolution of their imager. They can > then print exactly what they get, no surprises. You get full control of the > conversion process, and can review each image. If some are bad, you can use > different parameters or different software to process them. You don't want > the first edition to print with some griveous conversion fault - and they > don't want that either. > >
