Copy Function and Resolution in PDFs

Have you ever noticed that the resolutions of some items copied from PDFs are better than others? Some presentations have copied material from PDFs that is extremely difficult to read.

Here’s how to fix that...

These three copies of text are from the same PDF document. All were copied using the “Edit” “Take a Snapshot” feature. Why the difference?

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Bottom Line: The higher the PDF zoom selected when the copy is made, the greater the resolution of the copied material.

For reference, the three examples above were done with zooms of 33.3%, 66.7% and 800%.

One problem you encounter is that if you zoom before you select your text or graphic to copy, it becomes difficult to select because it is out of view. As seen below, with the zoom at 400%, not all of the note that I want to copy is visible.

To get around this, start with a zoom that allows you to highlight all that you want to copy. In this case, 100% works fine. Then select “Edit”, “Take a Snapshot”. This will give you a cursor that allows you to select the item you want to copy.

Highlight the desired text or graphic by using the left mouse key and dragging to complete the selection.

Now that the text is highlighted, zoom in using the zoom tool to obtain a copy resolution suitable to your needs. In the example below, 600%.

Now that you have zoomed to the desired resolution, “right-click” in the selection and choose “Copy Selected Graphic”. This places the selection on your clipboard, ready for pasting in your document.

The following slides show the same drawing copied from a PDF file at two different zoom levels.

Drawing Copy from PDF - 66.7% Zoom

Drawing Copy from PDF – 800% Zoom

A Word of CAUTIONRaising the resolution of copied text and graphics results in a larger file size.

For example, the same text presented earlier at various resolutions, each saved as an individual file resulted in:•Poor Resolution – 48 KB file•Medium Resolution – 52 KB file•Higher Resolution – 124 KB file

So, you can see that depending on the size of the document and how many items you copy in, it can make the final document size much larger.