David Schenken wrote:
TIFF is a bitmap, and has a minimum width line based on the DPI you allowed when the file was created.
Given a PDF, Adobe Reader or Acrobat will attempt to produce the actual width of the line subject to the minimum width based on the DPI of the printer or display.
So, if the TIFF is created at 100 DPI the smallest line is .010 wide, regardless of the pen table setting. If the pen table is set to .001 the result will still be .010.
On the PDF a .001 width being sent to a 300 dpi printer will result in a line that is .00333 wide. If it is sent to a 600 dpi printer it will be .001666 wide.
To make them look the same, the DPI at which they are created needs to match.
The reason zooming up in Reader looks better is that the width of the lines needs to be noticeably larger than the size of the pixels to avoid aliasing. By default, Reader trys anti-aliasing for very fine lines, unless the line weights option is used. (In ReaderX it is Preferences/Page Display/Enhance thin lines)
For a decent comparison, import the PDF into GIMP or Adobe Photoshop and change the DPI to which the image is coverted. You'll see the effect of pixel size vs minimum line width.
Wow! That solves my issues completely. Who would have known.
Printouts from PDF are the same regardless of setting (it appears) but screen viewing is seriously improved when disabling the Enhance thin lines option.
As for the TIFF vs PDF... In Creo 2.0 - They are very close to the same. The big difference is that shaded images don't plot with TIFF, and TIFF does plot some lines as gray rather than black where PDF plots thin black lines on tangent edges and fonted sketch lines. I set the System colors to black an d white; output to TIFF printer file (not export "POP" screen image)
PDF-Left TIFF-Right
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