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I am taking notes as a PDF from my textbook with LaTeX, and I am taking a screenshot with Shutter of some pictures in the book and trying to include them in the notes, but the image keeps coming out blurry. From Googling I believe this is because the DPI is wrong, but I have been unable to fix this.

Here is the image I am trying to include: enter image description here

but here is how it comes out in the PDF: enter image description here

A minimum example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}

\begin{document}
\includegraphics{graph_types.png}
\end{document}

I am using Ubuntu 14.04.2, Shutter 0.93.1, and pdflatex 3.1415926-2.5-1.40.14

iobender
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1 Answers1

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I believe that it is a smoothing effect. Observe that the blurred picture is slightly larger. If I zoom the webpage in Firefox (using CTRL-+), the smaller picture also becomes blurred.

If you look at the pdf generated by firefox with a suitable pdf viewer and if you change the zoom level, the blurring should also change. The problem is intrinsic: Scaling a bitmap picture with sharp edges always leads to such effects.

There's no easy way to completely avoid this. There's no way to make sure that one pixel in the screen shot will be one pixel when you watch the finished PDF file (everything depends on the screen resolution and the zoom setting of your pdf viewer). One thing you could try is to take the screen shot at a higher resolution, ie. zoom in before taking the screen shot.

jarauh
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    I took your idea and zoomed in on the original before taking a screenshot and that helped a decent amount. – iobender Oct 14 '15 at 03:04