I don’t see why it should be KiCad’s job to fix a bug in Powerpoint?
If you search for “Powerpoint blurry SVG” you will find lots of results, it seems like maybe they still don’t properly support SVG.
If you want to create high-quality documentation, use a high-quality document-creation software, not Powerpoint. Affinity Designer, Adobe InDesign, or Scribus (if you want an open-source option) are possible candidates.
KiCad could add a feature to export bitmaps, but this seems like a low-priority thing to do given that it can already export vector graphics which will always be higher quality.
The Export_To_Clipboard pushes a PNG to my system and PNG is what you should use in PowerPoint. I’m not going to bother posting a screenshot of the high quality results in my old PowerPoint.
I just did this (screenshot) in PowerPoint/365. It looks good to me.
Did it in Windows10 using the Export_To_Clipboard on my Mac/Kicad, then pasted into PowerPoint.
There are two ways to export a high-quality image from the schematic, as have been shown in this thread. The first is to export a vector (PDF, SVG) using the plot tool. This produces a “perfect” image with no resolution artifacts. The second is to use “Export to Clipboard” as BlackCoffee pointed out.
Since Powerpoint does not handle vector graphics correctly, if you want to use Powerpoint, you need to either use the Export to Clipboard method, or use a different tool to convert a PDF or SVG.
Guys, I’m not looking for a fight or to piss off the KiCAD devs. I’ve just reported an issue and I’ve got a lot of flack back for it including the claim that MS is not a high-quality documentation dev platform. Really? All of your screen shots are zoomed in. When I zoom into mine like that, they also look a lot better. My requirements are to snapshot a big schema on A3, and paste that into PP. If I do that, the image resoltion is not good - whether its PDF plot file, SVG or anything else. This issue does not exist on Traxmaker, DesignSpark or any other schematic editing package. That is my user experience.
NB: If I print the schema out on A3, it is perfect.
I’m going to step out of this for a while because clearly temperatures are rising.
Yes, really. Powerpoint is designed for making presentations, not high-resolution graphics that you would use for printing documents, etc. It only relatively-recently got support for SVG at all, and it sounds like that support is still not great.
That said: What you need is a way to convert a vector graphics file to a bitmap with a controllable resolution. KiCad doesn’t offer that, but many graphics editing packages do.
Two screenshots show a Full Schematic Sheet with Zoom at 100% and 178%
(naturally, the 178 zoom makes it too large for display window) but, can see resolution is good.
I’m not sure of accuracy of what I say but screen resolution is in the range of max 100 dpi while typical laser printer is 600 dpi. So you have to have screen with its both dimensions 6 times bigger than your paper sheet to get screen shot with respective resolution or you have to zoom in respectively. Using vector format you have no these problems.
I plot schematic as svg and use it in LibreOffice Writer not going through any bitmap format. Only for 3D PCB view I make screen shot from KiCad 3D view. I didn’t found vector output of 3D view, but I was searching when KiCad vas V4 and didn’t checked later.
If I’ll remember, I can try to use Powerpoint 365 for this task next week. Meanwhile I tried as much as I could but didn’t succeed getting anything blurry from KiCad. This is especially suspicious:
even when using the Windows Snip tool the schema is not good,
It’s remotely possible that some screenshot tool fails to take a proper image from OpenGL canvas of KiCad. However, I have used Windows Snip tool successfully as well as a couple of other tools on Windows and also Linux. The image is pixel for pixel what you see in the screen in the KiCad window. That’s the way they work.
Even if KiCad renders badly – so that you see it in the KiCad window in your monitor – this wouldn’t affect the vector format exporters. After a vector format has been exported, it has nothing to do with KiCad and everything to do with the post-processing programs. KiCad exports vectors to PDF and SVG which means they can be zoomed in and out without any blurring except what the viewing or editing program produces independently of the original file source. That’s how they work.
None of us is trying to deny KiCad has bugs and imperfect features or lack of features. However, I have never seen or heard anybody having those kinds of problems you describe, and I have been more or less active in bughunting and reading/answering this forum for quite many years. “Temperatures are rising” because all evidence this far tells us you are barking the wrong tree.
There is an awful lot of mis-communication in this thread, and I wonder how it got started and how it evolved.
It clearly started with the original question, which is very ill formed:
Both PDF and SVG export from KiCad is good. (PPS, is that postscript?)
Import in powerpoint is not relevant. It has nothing to do with KiCad (as has been mentioned a few times).
It seems that Bonsai ignores anything related to vector output or what happens in between KiCad export and the powerpoint input.
It is only in post 23 that a bit more clarity of the issue surfaces:
With vector output, there are no resolution problems, and paper size does not matter. The only thing I can see as a problem is the combination of:
Set Paper size to A3.
Maximize Schematic Editor.
Zoom to full page.
With this combination Texts are quite small, even on my 107cm 4k monitor, and KiCad starts having trouble with rendering (Which I also already mentioned earlier). But that is just on-screen rendering. I am not sure how that relates to the rest of this “problem”.
KiCad does not bother itself much with rasterized output, and I’m perfectly happy with that. I often grab screenshots of parts of a schematic for posting on this forum, and that works perfectly fine.
On top of that, I would not want to have rasterized output of an A3 sheet in my documentation.
I’m (still) not sure Bonzai wants. Is it “high quality raster output”, is it “good looking powerpoint import” or something else or in between?
This is the worst I can get out from KiCad, File → Export → Drawing to Clipboard. Pasted to LibreOffice Impress (similar to Powerpoint). It’s a bitmap and can’t be scaled, so this is expected.
But see the next page. I plotted to SVG, opened in Libreoffice Draw, selected the graphics, used context menu → Crop (to remove empty page area around the schematic), Edit → Copy, pasted to Impress. It can be scaled without problems and looks impeccable.
Of course I can zoom out in KiCad and take a screenshot and get it as bad as I want because it copies the screen image seen in the monitor, pixel by pixel:
no, don’t do that, that is still going to be lower resolution because that is a windows screen capture being pasted into PowerPoint. While this bypasses the issue with PowerPoint its not the best you can do.
The best with PDF is to use Acroread copy option and then paste your clipboard into powerpoint
The absolute best is to export as SVG, use Inkscape, select and Export as PNG with the dps at say 256… THEN insert image the PNG you just exported.
Gosh, I forgot about that one, and it’s a good suggestion.
I did a bit of experimentation here, and the results are a bit weird.
It always put the full sheet onto the clipboard, but the resolution varies.
A5, A4 and A3 paper size outputs the bitmap with the same “pixel size”, but on larger paper sizes the export has a lower total pixel count, which makes the number of pixels per letter a lot lower, and the export becomes unusable.
Resolution: Readability:
A5 2480 x 1748 Good
A4 3507 x 2480 Good
A3 4960 x 3507 Good
A2 4677 x 3307 Usable.
A1 4414 x 3118 Marginal.
A0 4160 x 2943 Not usable.
Collation of “export to clipboard” for different paper sizes:
PowerPoint is the problem. For 95% of folks they only want to show a picture. So PP does not really support zooming the way a CAD program does. You have a different expectation for PP than how it actually functions.
You may be able to embed a link in PP for a native Kicad file, which will allow you to open Kicad and operate in the tool, not in PP.
There’s nothing wrong with Powerpoint 365’s SVG support. I can export SVG from KiCad, copy the file in the File Explorer and paste it into Pp. It scales as it should and the quality is good.
As other users suggested I tried to export to clipboard and the image is pretty great and crispy… I didn’t tried to import in PP, but if the imported picture would be bad, that’s not anymore a problem related to Kicad…
also the idea to simply create a link to open the Kicad schematic might give you the best flexibility.
In general I would avoid to have a full schematic on a slide in power point… unless you are 100% sure that it will be shown on very high resolution with crisp details and good contrast device (projector, monitor or whatever…).
I plotted to a .PDF file in black and white and the results are ok - see below. This prints out ok on A3 from a PP file. If I get any complaints about the quality, I can always print it out and scan it in on the A3 flatbed scanner, so this issue is closed for me. Thanks for the help etc - appreciate it.
Interesting thread here Bonsai and a function I would want myself. I hope this hasn’t already been suggested. If that is the case my apologies for wasting time.
I’ve just tried printing to a .prn file and converting online. Couldn’t find a convertor which returned anything other than a blank document. The .prn file seems fine if I open it in Notepad++. There is a human readable header then a shed load of unintelligible data.
I then wondered about what other print options were offered in Kicad when I selected ‘Print to File’. I found ‘Microsoft Print to PDF’ was a printer option and, whaddya know, it worked! Here is the result. It’s a screenshot of a small section of a schematic displayed in my PDF viewer (Foxit PDF reader) at 1250% zoom, and the zoom goes much further if I want to without any further loss of resolution.
