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Post by antharro on Jan 30, 2023 9:24:36 GMT
Since 2006, I've had a printed tube map on my office wall. This map is now well faded and very out of date. I downloaded the latest tube map from TFL, printed it out, but because there's so much more on the map, it's tiny, hard to read, and the text quality is poor. I tried extracting just the map from the PDF at high resolution but it still looks awful on paper. I tried the "large print" map just in case but that was no use either. I also tried just sticking a regular tube map to the wall but nope, too small!
At the same time, I decided to replace my similar vintage South West Trains map with a current South Western Railway map - that printed out perfectly with great text quality and sharpness and looks great.
Is anyone aware of a high resolution tube map that would be ideal for printing?
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Chris L
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Post by Chris L on Jan 30, 2023 20:48:54 GMT
I wonder if they have used postscript fonts to create the map and subsequent PDF.
If the text was not converted to outlines before saving. This could be the cause of the ragged text.
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Post by zbang on Jan 30, 2023 21:10:21 GMT
I've zoooomed in on the standard map and at 1600% it still looks good on the screen using a PDF viewer, didn't look so good using the viewer in Firefox browser. Some viewers are not good at scaling for large print, and many print drivers aren't good at rasterizing a large image for printing as multiple pages (tiles).
(The metadata says it was produce by Adobe Illustrator (MAC) and contains embedded fonts, so those should scale well.)
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Chris L
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Post by Chris L on Jan 31, 2023 7:39:59 GMT
I opened the map from the TfL website in Chrome. Downloaded it and opened in Adobe Reader. Printed on A4 on my HP Colour Laser.
The text looked fine and just about readable.
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Post by trt on Jan 31, 2023 12:07:42 GMT
Beware PCL6! All manner of ills can befall typefaces processed by this.
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Post by antharro on Feb 5, 2023 7:33:52 GMT
It's "just about readable", but that's not good enough for going on my wall. The SWR map is crystal clear and readable from a surprising distance; the TfL map is fuzzy and unreadable until I'm up close. As zbang said, it's possible to zoom very far in using a PDF reader, but it doesn't print out that way.
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Chris L
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Post by Chris L on Feb 5, 2023 8:32:11 GMT
It's "just about readable", but that's not good enough for going on my wall. The SWR map is crystal clear and readable from a surprising distance; the TfL map is fuzzy and unreadable until I'm up close. As zbang said, it's possible to zoom very far in using a PDF reader, but it doesn't print out that way. If you have an A3 printer and use the free Adobe Reader software you should get a printable version to download and print. |
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Post by antharro on Feb 5, 2023 9:18:51 GMT
I have an A3 printer but I'm not looking for an A3 print; I'm looking for an A4 print to sit under my SWR A4 print.
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Chris L
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Post by Chris L on Feb 5, 2023 10:16:53 GMT
I have an A3 printer but I'm not looking for an A3 print; I'm looking for an A4 print to sit under my SWR A4 print. Have you tried the A4 print using Adobe Reader and downloading the result? |
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Post by zbang on Feb 6, 2023 5:35:00 GMT
This sounds more like a printing issue than one with the PDF.
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Post by trt on Feb 6, 2023 17:54:13 GMT
I just had a similar problem - if you have Acrobat Pro you can change the pre-flight rules to embed the full font into the document. Preflighting saves a new copy of the file all packaged up, complete, efficiently sized and ready to go to a printer. But it could be a complex tool if you've not had any experience in the print & graphic design industry.
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