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Known Participant
March 14, 2016
Question

I forgot how to change the FM display settings to show high quality graphics...

  • March 14, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 627 views

I've been using InDesign for the past year, and forgot how to change the display setting in FM to display graphics in the highest quality (so I can see them, not blurry pixels).

In InDesign, the setting is View --> Display Performance --> High Quality Display

Can anyone help me remember how to do the same thing in FM?

P.S. These are vector eps graphics, they are not actually blurry raster images.

Thanks

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    2 replies

    Arnis Gubins
    Inspiring
    March 15, 2016

    Depending upon the application that created the EPS, you might be able to specify the preview resolution.

    If you only have the EPS files and not the source files nor applicaton that created the EPS, then you could use Acrobat/Distiller to convert to PDF and save back out as EPS. The EPS from this route is at a much higher resolution (and in colour) than from most other applications. FM can also use the PDF directly,  but it converts it internally back to EPS anyway, so if you have lots of these, just do the conversion once.

    Bob_Niland
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 14, 2016

    re: These are vector eps graphics, they are not actually blurry raster images.

    Unless some feature was added to FM after the newest version I've used (FM9), you are remembering a feature that isn't there. You can turn graphics on or off, but you can't control how FM previews them.

    In the specific case of EPS images viewed at 100%, what you see in preview (during edit), and when printing to a non-PostScript(like) printer, is a 72dpi indexed color or grayscale thumbnail.

    You can hack around this by using a decent vector editor, like Illustrator, to redefine the size of the image by 400%. Then scale it in FM to 25%. You are now working with a fairly crisp 288dpi thumbnail.

    There are diminishing returns above 4x for the scaling trick. Scaling also increases the size of any PDF generated, because these hi-res thumbs are large data objects, and being indexed color, are largely incompressible. Use Acrobat (Std/Pro) downstream to remove metadata, because there's actually almost no reason for those thumbnails to remain.

    ProjectusAuthor
    Known Participant
    March 14, 2016

    Thanks for responding. I must have worked with different file types or something...I never used to see graphics this way. There's no way to see clearly enough to add callouts or arrows or anything with the graphics appearing as they do now. No idea what I used to do.

    Bob_Niland
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 14, 2016

    re: There's no way to see clearly enough to add callouts or arrows or anything with the graphics appearing as they do now.

    For graphics file formats where FM displays the embedded preview/thumbnail, use the scaling trick and remove meta later. File formats affected by this include EPS and PDF, possibly others I never used. I found 4x/25% to suffice for adding callouts.

    Alternatively, generate a TIFF when creating the original EPS artwork. Import that. Annotate. Replace it with the EPS. I've done this too, but found the scaling trick to be a more efficient workflow, since we were removing metadata anyway (yes, your camera EXIF data can survive into the PDF too).