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prop_design15-Moonstone
15-Moonstone
February 28, 2020
Question

Using images in Matchad

  • February 28, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 8051 views

hi,

 

i'm assuming this is a known issue, but i'm wondering what the status of this is. if you paste an image into matchad or mathcad prime, different things happen. prime seems much better at handling images, but i don't like prime. so i use classic mathcad. in classic mathcad, if you paste an image that is 8 inches wide, it looks ok. but if you save as pdf it looks terrible. so you have to paste in something much larger than 8 inches wide, then use the handles to shrink it down to 8 inches. if you save that as pdf it looks fine. however, in mathcad it looks terrible and blurry. you can barely see the image. in smath you can paste in an image very easily. if it's bigger than 8inches it easily and automatically is re-scaled to fit the page width. it also looks amazing. better than mathcad or prime. however, i don't care for smath. it would be great if classic mathcad could handle images much better than it currently does. what i do is create documentation where i place math symbols over the picture, to annotate it. i have a whole bunch of documents already made. i just have to deal with how terrible mathcad works in this regard, as it's still the best solution for what i'm doing. any thoughts are appreciated. i searched the forum many times, but didn't really find anything that helped.

 

anthony

 

ps; this should happen with any image you try. but if it helps, here is just one particularly terrible example. i tried all kinds of ways of making the image. i remembered that, in older versions of mathcad, bitmaps were the only thing that worked. so i used bitmaps here. but i also tried png files and got the same results. i tested both methods and looked at the file size. it seems like mathcad converts the bitmaps to png files, which is great.

1 reply

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Werner_E25-Diamond I
25-Diamond I
February 28, 2020

The pictures  very OK and crisp clear when I open the pdf file you attached. But I see the problem in the Mathcad file. Its true that Mathcad never was good when it came to scaling inserted pictures.

Your first picture has a size of 25 inch x 22.22 inch with a resolution of of 1800 pixels x 1600 pixels. This means a pixel density of 72 pixels per inch (ppi). Have you tried to convert the picture to something with 225 ppi? This won't change the resolution and would not loose any information. A program aware of the ppi information in the file would just scale it down to a width of 8 inches. Not sure if Mathcad will display such a modified file the way you expect.

EDIT: Just tried and unfortunately Mathcad ignores the ppi information in the files. It seems to display the file with screen resolution.

So only way out would be what you already did (with the effect of an unusable display in Mathcad but a useful print) or resizing the picture with a third party program which would of course loose information. That way you may have a balance between display quality in MC and printout.

 

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prop_design15-MoonstoneAuthor
15-Moonstone
February 28, 2020

hi,

 

unfortunately, i tried both of your suggestions previously. if you output as 300ppi it doesn't work. if you scale in another program it doesn't work. the only way i can have a usable image in mathcad is to do a 8 inch wide image. but it looks horrible in pdf. so i have to choose between a nice pdf file or something i can see in mathcad. but you can't have both. they fixed this in prime. but i hate prime. i actually spent a day manually converting the files i made in prime back to mathcad. since they decided not to let anyone easily switch back. then i uninstalled prime altogether. if you paste the images i provided into smath you will see how nice that works out. it would be great if mathcad did the same. they can blow up prime and never speak of it again as far as i'm concerned.

 

ps; the program i made the images in works best with 72dpi. but i have tried 300dpi anyways. i forget the pixel width that mathcad is ok with for a 8in wide picture. i think it's around 600 pixels wide to 800 pixels wide and 72dpi. but those look horrible in pdf. the 1800 pixels wide examples that i provided are what look good in pdf, but mathcad can't display them well for some reason. you also have to manually scale them down to 8 inches wide, which is a pain.

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Werner_E25-Diamond I
25-Diamond I
February 29, 2020

I see what you mean. Looks like theres no satisfiable solution.

I wouldn't wait for PTC to fix the problem in MC15 - they won't do that.

 

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