hardcopies with FM in poor quality

[Guest]

Printing my Text with referenced pictures as PDF-file and sending this to the printer, I have get a hardcopy a good quality but sending it to the same printer directly from FrameMaker the pictures are more or less in preview-quality. Did I miss to change some FrameMaker-settings or what is wrong?

[Bob_Niland]

The usual cause of this is:

• your graphics are EPS or PDF (which have embedded coarse preview or thumbnail images), and
• you are printing via a driver that is not PostScript (for example, hp PCL).

Fixes (pick one):

• Render to PDF and print that.
• Switch to the PostScript driver for the printer (assuming it supports multiple PDLs). You might need to install the Ps driver.
• File an enhancement request with Adobe to have an option in Framemaker to preview and draft print all graphics at actual resolution (ignoring preview/thumbnails). Wait. This might take some time.

Displaying thumbnail/preview images in FM made a lot of sense back when computers and video cards were slower and lacked RAM. I recall 8x10 300 dpi TIFs taking 30 minutes just to display the page on Win3.1. This is no longer a problem, but it's not trivial to code, as it would require interpreting and rendering PostScript data structures on the fly.

[Guest]

You are right assuming that the problem appears with eps-files. Thanks for your advice - I will try to install a PS-driver and report about the result. Until then I will take the diversion via PDF.