PI 12, Text at 8pt Arial Prints Poorly

[JoshHobbs]

I feel quite emberassed to ask what seems to be -what should be- a fundemental question/understanding.

I am fairly new to Photo Impact 12.

I am doing some print layouts for a magazine ad we are running, and can't seem to get my text to print clear.

At 8pt, Black, Arial, 2D Object, nothing else selected (that I can tell), the text looks faded and distorted. Not clear at all. Even at 18pt it looks bad.

I simply can not figure out how to make my text appropriately look clear and 'sharp'.

Using any other graphics programs, word, or any other program I have,
outputing through my laser printer is sharp and clear.

It's just printing text from Photo Impact that looks so bad.

I haven't been able to figure it out, and I need to submit this ad soon.

Thanks for the help

[heinz-oz]

The problem is that what you create with PI is not text, it's an image. PI applies all sorts of things to an image by default, not only compression. Dithering comes into it and, of course, anti aliasing. The anti aliasing and dithering work at pixel level and, if your image is relatively small, the adverse effect is very noticeable.

Try to disable anti aliasing and dithering and don't compress the image when saving. Bmp works quite well for me but the file size is kind of large. But, if your image is for printing, the file format and size should not matter.

[JoshHobbs]

Thank you for your help heinz-oz

Sadly . . .

Printing Text from within PI12 still yields way too poor of a result me.

I don't know if the jpg attachment I made will come through here, however I tried Arial 8pt through 22pt tests with Anti-Aliasing Smooth, Strong and Sharp, as well as Disabled, and not one method printed to an acceptable level. Tested 24 combinations all together.

I know there's a way for the text to print clear and 'sharp', but I just haven't found it yet, and sadly because I am not trying to make a career of this, I feel PI 12 is on its way to the can for me.

Thanks for your help . . .

[sjj1805]

Can you try this furthet test.
Create your text in Windows Notepad - alter the text and size to something of your liking. Now select all of the text with your mouse and copy.

Paste that into PhotoImpact as an object. Does it appear better than the other method which is to enter text with the PhotoImpact text tool?

Please post your results good or bad.
Thank you.

[heinz-oz]

We have had this discussion many times over the years. PI is an entry level image editor and graphics creation tool and not a professional program. For what it costs, it's excellent value for money in my books. It is, however, not a text tool. Even a much more expensive program like PhotoShop etc. has the same or similar problems from what I can gather.

To make publishable newsletter, flyer's etc. a tool especially designed for that is needed. Sadly, but naturally, that will cost a fair amount of money Adobe Illustrator, Quark, or CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 are what is needed. The program has to be vector graphics based to allow scaling without quality loss.

[Clevo]

or something like Pagemaker...

It's a publishing program that's needed.