[PookJP]

Hello! I find myself now in a very scary situation. I need to convert approximately 300 .GIF physics illustrations to .PDFs. These are simple black-line illustrations of circuits, vectors, fields, and so on. They typically consist of black lines or curves, some arrows, and a letter here and there.

The trouble that I'm having is that when I convert these .GIFs to .PDFs, the print quality if vasty degraded from the screen image. This will not do because these images need to be printed and used in presentations. Thus, I may be forced to redraw all 300+ images in Illustrator, a task that would take me weeks, and would be most tedious.

Do any of you have any suggestions for how to convert a simple black line diagram to .PDF and have it print smooth lines with legiable text? Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

- Pook

[MrTomServo]

Well, you have three options.

1. Redraw them. This is probably the option with the largest time investment.

2. Try and use the Auto Trace tool in Illustrator. The Auto Trace tool tries to draw vectors out of bitmap images. However, the quality of the vectors it makes are inversely proportional to the complexity of the bitmap image. So, if you have a very complex line drawing, the Auto Trace tool won't make a very good reproduction of it.

3. Use a program like Adobe Streamline. Streamline can take bitmaps and make very high quality line art from them. I've heard plenty of good things about it. Downside: it's US$120.

HTH!

Robert

[MrTomServo]

Forgot the URL: http://www.adobe.com/products/streamline/

And, it appears that it does have a free tryout of some type, but I don't know if it's a fully-functional 30-day thing, or a feature-limited demo. Try it and see.

Robert

[bluedog]

Find the original files that created the GIF files. You should not have to redraw them if you find the originals.

SOMEONE created these and saved them as GIF files. They are likely low resolution files and look good in a web browser, no? If that's the case, they are too small to be any good except for onscreen presentations.

If you find the original files, be they Powerpoint, or EPS files or such, you can do something with them. When/if you find them, write back to the forum for what's the best format for your application and use.

I sincerely hope you can find the source files, because, it sounds like there just isn't enough information in the GIF files to convert them to something *printworthy*.

Unless it will cost you your job, I would tell whomever is requesting them that it is not possible to do what they are asking without the original files. It should be the originator's responsibility to keep their source files around. If there never was a source file or some automated process to create the GIFs, then you either bite the bullet and redraw them, or look for a new job.

Hey its just a hunch considering you mentioned the files were of a physics topic. If they are creating these on a unix system or any other you should be able to get postscript out of them and then use Adobe Distiller to create the vector-based PDFs you need. That goes for any mac or PC applications, too. If you get the files and need some help with it, just email me.

[ 07-06-2001: Message edited by: bluedog ]