Bitmap prints excellent but in preview it's a garbage...

rbuser

Hi,
I am using Report Builder pro 7.02 and on one report there are some images
that need to be printed out.
The first one is large BMP loaded into ppImage and has a size 1700x612 pix
(2 bit). On preview screen it is very rough and jaggy while on our printer
(HP LaserJet 2100) it prints perfect, allmost without any jaggies.
The next images are stored in imagelist and are dynamically placed (as it is
written in the table used by report) into 96 small ppImage components.
Original size as stored in image list is 25x25 pix while ppImages are of
size around 3x3mm. These bitmaps don't even show on preview screen! I have
tried with some more ppImage components with size from 3x3mm up to 5x5mm and
one with autosize. They display depending on zoom, but still printing result
is excellent.
In the latter case dynamic assigning is used via TitleBandBeforePrint (as it
is everything placed on Title band).
In the first case I have converted image to WMF using PaintShopPro and the
image was still far from perfect (maybe because it was not a true vector
graphic?)
Any ideas?

Best regards
Goran Brumen

nicocizik

Goran,

Converting a .wmf file to a bitmap by simply saving the file as a different
file type will not give you a real conversion of the .wmf image. A true
.wmf file contains rendering instructions, such as font information and
sizes, and line and shape instructions. When converting directly to a
bitmap, you will only get a pixel to pixel conversion and your screen
quality will be compromised. The article below gives more information on
this topic.


------------------------------------------
Article: Forms Emulation in Report Builder
------------------------------------------

Customers often ask how to include their pdf forms in report builder so they
can do forms emulation like our provided demo. Unfortunately, Report Builder
only supports windows metafiles (.emf) for this feature. This leads to the
question of how to convert a pdf document to an emf document.

The tax form in our tutorial was created by a customer. He used the MIPS
Transform Suite to do it at the time. It looks like the product has been
renamed to e-Transform 2000. It is available at: http://www.g7ps.com/ .

Another option is Adobe Illustrator 10. Although we haven't tried it, we
have heard that is has excellent support of vector graphic format
conversions.

Finally, there is an open source freeware product called pstoedit which can
be obtained form http://www.pstoedit.net/pstoedit. It's been around for
quite awhile so it probably works pretty well. The con is that these types
of apps can be tricky to get set up.

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rbuser

Hi Nico!

Thank You for Your reply. These reports are not for any customer form, they
are just a report from my medical aplication and there are some signs to be
printed out on paper. I agree that PSP is not the best software to convert
bitmaps to vector format, but the main problem still stays: the best and
sharp graphics for preview must be in vector based graphic format?

Best regards,
Goran

nicocizik

Hi Goran,

Since .wmf files do use this instruction style rendering, they would produce
the best output on screen. Note that the ReportBuilder Engine uses the
printer driver to render these images and is then converting them to screen
resolution for the display. For this reason, you are going to loose some
quality when viewing images on screen.

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rbuser

Hi Nico,
thank You for explaining this to me. That explains everything.

Best regards,
Goran