[OS X TeX] half the size - double dpi...

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 8 mai 04, à 15:18, Mihalis Tsoukalos a écrit :

> I got a screen dump (using Option-Shift-4 and space) that I want to 
> use in LaTeX. The screen dump is big and low-quality (72 dpi).
> I want to make it half the size and double its quality (144 dpi).
> Is there a way to do this outside LaTeX?
>
> [snip]
>
> What does the above do to the file quality (dpi)? Does it make the 
> output dpis 2.5 (1/.4) times more?
> I want the output file format to be pdf.

Did you try using Grab (in /Applications/Utilities/) instead? It 
creates screenshots (of the whole screen, of a selected area, of a 
window, of a menu) in TIFF format, which you can then open in Preview 
and convert from Preview to other formats including PDF. In my 
experience the files so produced are quite large. I imagine the 
resolution is the screen resolution.

You may also want to try GraphicConverter <http://www.lemkesoft.de/en/> 
to perform operations on the graphical file. It used to be shipped with 
Macs (it was on my present one-year-old PowerBook G4), I don't know 
whether that's still the case now. A "problem" though is that by 
default it tries to add a preview to the file, and also a custom icon 
for the Finder; these are both OS 9 inheritage, clearly unnecessary for 
OS X. In addition to making files significantly larger, they also add 
resources to the file, breaking compatibility with other platforms 
(Unix, Windows) in case you perform a file transfer. Hence I would 
advise disabling these options before converting any file with 
GraphicConverter.

Other solutions, of course, are Adobe Photoshop (I don't have it) or 
Gimp.app (<http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/> and 
<http://gimp-app.sourceforge.net/> -- requires the optional 
installation of Panther's X11). I don't use the Gimp myself for now, 
but I've heard and read good things about it, maybe it can perform 
conversions as well.

Hope this helps,

Bruno Voisin
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