At 11:17 AM 4/16/98 -0500, Lucinda Belden wrote:
>This time I'm dealing with a different printer and they said they keep
>getting a bitmap looking graphic with the fonts all jagged.  I suggested
>opening the graphic in Adobe Photoshop and changing the resolution but the
>printer said once it is made in a specific resolution, you can't go in and
>change it.

Counter to what some have suggested about using 300 dpi as a standard
resolution for print purposes, the value is entirely dependent on the
resolution of the final printed output. In other words, if the printer is
using a line-screen, for halftone work, of 133 lines per inch (lpi), the
resolution you use for the image need only be 1.5 to 2 times that value
(200 to 266 dpi). Anything above that is just unused data that takes up
extra hard drive space and extra RIP (raster image processor) time.

That said, type should never (or rarely) be produced with a bitmap editor
(Photoshop), but rather with a vector program (such as Adobe Illustrator)
because it can then be produced at the full resolution of the RIP (i.e.,
2540 dpi), thus the edges of the text come out crisp and clean. No amount
of resolution fiddling in Photoshop can achieve this. The best thing is to
create the non-text portion of the image in Photoshop, import it into the
vector program (Illustrator or other), and place the text in the vector
program.

For more information on this (an excellent resource), see "Real World
Scanning and Halftones," by Steven Roth.

Byron Canfield (http://www.byronc.com)
Art Director, ZDNet AnchorDesk
http://www.anchordesk.com
==============================
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