Dingbat Font Prints Blurry from PSP, but fine from Word

[oredraven04]

Hi all-
I'm using a dingbat font to create a herbal border for paper. Here's what I have so far...

Herbal Border WiP

Image17.jpg (15.64 KiB) Viewed 1708 times

Unfortunately, when I print from PSP, the font prints blurry, not crisp. However, when I use the same font and font size in Word, it prints fine. See photo: Green was printed from PSP. Red was printed from Word. The difference is more dramatic than it looks in this photo.

Font Printed from PSP vs Word

Any thoughts on how I can get this font to print nicely from PSP? Reading up on font issues in PSP tells me to change the resolution, but all that does is make everything gigantic. If I then resize the gigantic version it gets even more blurry. Clearly I'm doing something wrong, but I'm not finding a clear explanation of how to fix the text blurring with a resolution change. The instructions are too general - just "change to 300 dpi". Can anyone give me a clear explanation of how to keep my font small (72 pt) and get a clear printout in PSP?

Thanks a ton! - O

[LeviFiction]

So, word doesn't deal in digital sizes, it uses physical sizes and then scales to whatever resolution you choose to print at. Where as PSP is all about digital sizes and you have to work out what physical size you want.

Here are some practical examples.

1pt font is 1/72 of an inch. So in Word a 72pt font is always 1 physical inch. If I print at 300ppi from Word, then word will make the determination to print that font at 300pixels. If I choose to print at a higher resolution, it'll print at a higher resolution. It's all rendered on the fly.

In PSP if you use points it uses the current resolution (ppi) of the image to determine how many pixels tall that is. So if you had 72ppi resolution image, a 72 pt font would be literally 72 pixels. If you have a 300ppi image, then the 72 point font is 300 pixels. You can print these at any resolution you want, but PSP doesn't scale anything when printing. What you give it is what it'll use. If you give it 72 pixels in an inch and then tell it to print at 300 pixels. It'll just make those 27 pixels larger and blurrier to meet your printing requirements.

When you use resize to change the ppi you need to be careful that you're not also changing the print dimensions. Because you're designing for print. This will increase the number of pixels, and PSP will change the size of the font. After it does this, go back and in make sure to reset the font size to 72pt to make sure PSP is correctly calculating the size. It will look large, again, because now each character is 300 pixels tall. But when you print it out at a matching resolution the 300ppi should print correctly.

[Radim]

Perhaps for this is more fit Inkscape. With output as vector PDF.