Exporting to PDF without losing quality

Question

Hi there. I created a business card on PowerPoint but when I try exporting it to PDF through the Acrobat tab the images in the card get blurry or pixelated around the edges while the text remains crisp. I have the "Do not compress images in file" box selected. Is there anything I can do to stop the images from getting pixelated?

Answer 1

Hi,

You might want to take a look at the quality settings. To check the quality settings, kindly follow these steps:

1. Go to File.
2. Select Options.
3. Click Advance.
4. Under the Image Size and Quality section, look for Set default target output to and select the ppi you prefer.

Let us know if this helps and we'll assist you further if needed.

Answer 2

Hi,

You might want to take a look at the quality settings. To check the quality settings, kindly follow these steps:

1. Go to File.
2. Select Options.
3. Click Advance.
4. Under the Image Size and Quality section, look for Set default target output to and select the ppi you prefer.

Let us know if this helps and we'll assist you further if needed.

In my version of PowerPoint (2016) the setting is called Default Resolution. It is currently set to High Fidelity, which I believe is supposed to preserve the current resolution.

Answer 3

Thanks ... I get pretty much the same result with PPT's Save As PDF option, but when I use the Acrobat save as PDF feature, my results are quite a bit better than what Acrobat's doing for you.

More than likely this is because I've changed Acrobat's default settings in the past.  I don't recall what they were originally, but have a look at:

File | Print, choose the Acrobat PDF printer driver, then click Printer Properties.

Choose the Adobe PDF settings tab.  Try switching from Standard to Press quality (or similar wording) or create your own copy of Standard then Edit and make sure that it's using ZIP rather than JPG compression for both BW and color images, set it to a higher DPI and so on. 

Save the new settings, make sure that your new settings are selected in Adobe PDF tab, then give Acrobat another shot at it.

Answer 4

>> which I believe is supposed to preserve the current resolution.

It is. 

A couple of things to check:

In the past, if you had an empty content or picture placeholder on the slide when you inserted a picture, the picture would drop in to the placeholder AND would be compressed, regardless of your compression settings.  This unwanted compression seems to have been corrected in the most recent version/update of 2016, at least.  To be sure you have this:

• Start a new presentation (blank is fine)
• Add a new title & content slide
• Reduce the content placeholder to a small size
• Add a picture to it
• Now enlarge the placeholder

Does the picture become blurry?  If so, you might want to force an update and try again. If not, we've eliminated one possible cause.

PPT's compression settings don't affect the compression that Adobe Acrobat's PDF printer driver applies.  Try using PPT's own File | Save As | Save as type:  PDF and be sure to choose the "Standard (publishing ...)" option. 

How does that compare with the result from Acrobat?

I find PPT's PDF save feature to be WAY faster than Acrobat's and generally prefer the result, but there are times when you need the extra control that Acrobat gives you.  If so, yell.  One of us will explain how to make it happen.

Answer 5

Hi Steve. I followed your instructions re the update issue and the picture does not become more blurry if I enlarge it so that must not be the issue.

When I saved using PPT's Save As everything got a lot more pixelated than if I use the Acrobat tab. Even the text got pixelated, whereas when using the Acrobat tab only the images become blurrier.