You might find an alternate print-to-pdf printer driver for win. If there are any settings to tweak at print time you may find a way to up the resolution. Good luck!
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alternate print-to-pdf driver
Yes, that seems plausible. And I just discovered that apparently there’s some way to increase or reduce the resolution of the MS Print to PDF driver. But all these paths are a distraction from some immediate tasks, so I’ll have to look into that later.
Your resolution looks way better than the result I’ve ever gotten when “printing” to PDFs! But I dont think that the PDF is searchable? I like to be able to search for component designators in the final PDF. For that reason, and my problems with low resolution, I developed Board2Pdf.
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That does raise a good point.
Did @teletypeguy’s method produce PDFs that contain bitmaps, or vectors+(searchable) text, or vectors + (not searchable) vector text?
Anytime the printer driver to PDF provided by the OS is used, it will be bitmap information in some form, and non-searchable text.
Only export to PDF done by KiCad itself (natively or possibly plugin) will produce vector based PDFs and searchable text.
I just tried printing to PDF, using the Microsoft provided ‘print to pdf’ option, and the resolution was fine, even when zoomed.
This was printed as a pdf at 1:1, then viewed with Acrobat reader, zoomed in, then I grabbed the example with the snipping tool
@Paul.Blitz For reference, what are the height and line-width of the text on the PCB in your screen cap, for example, “R1”?
Thanks
FYI
I just tested pdfCropMargins and it seems to be broken atm. At least for me, it installed PyPDF2 v3.0.0 and it doesn’t seem to be compatible with this version yet. I’ve reported this issue to the pdfCropMargins repo, so hopefully it will be solved soon. I solved it by downgrading to PyPDF2 v2.12.1.
$ pip install pdfcropmargins
Collecting pdfcropmargins
Using cached pdfCropMargins-1.1.8-py2.py3-none-any.whl (1.8 MB)
Collecting PyPDF2>=2.11.0
Using cached pypdf2-3.0.0-py3-none-any.whl (232 kB)
Collecting pillow>=9.3.0
Downloading Pillow-9.3.0-cp310-cp310-win_amd64.whl (2.5 MB)
---------------------------------------- 2.5/2.5 MB 9.2 MB/s eta 0:00:00
Collecting wheel
Downloading wheel-0.38.4-py3-none-any.whl (36 kB)
Collecting PySimpleGUI>=4.40.0
Using cached PySimpleGUI-4.60.4-py3-none-any.whl (509 kB)
Collecting PyMuPDF>=1.20.0
Downloading PyMuPDF-1.21.1-cp310-cp310-win_amd64.whl (11.7 MB)
---------------------------------------- 11.7/11.7 MB 11.1 MB/s eta 0:00:00
Installing collected packages: PySimpleGUI, wheel, PyPDF2, PyMuPDF, pillow, pdfcropmargins
Attempting uninstall: pillow
Found existing installation: Pillow 9.2.0
Uninstalling Pillow-9.2.0:
Successfully uninstalled Pillow-9.2.0
Successfully installed PyMuPDF-1.21.1 PyPDF2-3.0.0 PySimpleGUI-4.60.4 pdfcropmargins-1.1.8 pillow-9.3.0 wheel-0.38.4
[notice] A new release of pip available: 22.1.2 -> 22.3.1
[notice] To update, run: python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip
$ pip uninstall PyPDF2
Found existing installation: PyPDF2 3.0.0
Uninstalling PyPDF2-3.0.0:
Would remove:
c:\users\denne\appdata\local\programs\python\python310\lib\site-packages\pypdf2-3.0.0.dist-info\*
c:\users\denne\appdata\local\programs\python\python310\lib\site-packages\pypdf2\*
Proceed (Y/n)?
Successfully uninstalled PyPDF2-3.0.0
$ pip install --user install pypdf2==2.12.1
Collecting install
Downloading install-1.3.5-py3-none-any.whl (3.2 kB)
Collecting pypdf2==2.12.1
Downloading pypdf2-2.12.1-py3-none-any.whl (222 kB)
---------------------------------------- 222.8/222.8 kB 6.9 MB/s eta 0:00:00
Installing collected packages: pypdf2, install
Successfully installed install-1.3.5 pypdf2-2.12.1
[notice] A new release of pip available: 22.1.2 -> 22.3.1
[notice] To update, run: python.exe -m pip install --upgrade pip
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