Using images in Matchad

[prop_design]

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.

[Werner_E]

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.

[prop_design]

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.

[Werner_E]

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.

[prop_design]

thanks werner,

yeah, it seems like they already did fix it in prime. so that is why i was curious of the status for classic mathcad. it's sad that a free software program, with a one person development team, spanks the crap out of mathcad. although, even in it's heyday, mathcad was a two person development team.

the issue with classic mathcad seems like one of using it's built in image scaling. when you do that, it messes up the display inside mathcad for some reason. which is really weird. i can live with it the way it is. but i hadn't seen anything in the forum about it. i can't believe i'm the only one who has ran into this. fundamentally, the pdf file needs a lot of pixels. i imagine that if you have a big screen, even my example images may still be too small. however, for an 8 inch wide piece of paper, you can only fit 600 pixels without going over the width of the page. so there is just a disconnect there where you have to use the built in image scaling, to have a good pdf file.

in any event, classic mathcad is still my favorite of the available options. it's too bad they refuse to fix even something simple that a freeware developer can do 10x better.

[LucMeekes]

"or resizing the picture with a third party program which would of course loose information".

I do not agree.

In both pictures the width is 1800 pixels, but the first AND the last 200 pixels of width only contain white space. That is, you can easily crop 400/1800 = 22 % off of these pictures.

Attached are (Microsoft print to pdf) files created from Mathcad 11, Prime (4) and Smath studio with those pictures.

Where's the difference?

Well, Prime creates a 2 MB file from it, while Mathcad 11 manages similar or better picture quality in just over one tenth of that size. I'll agree, the output of Smath studio beats the other two, both in picture quality as well as in storage efficiency.

Success!

Luc

[prop_design]

hi luc,

maybe i confused some people. the issue is with classic mathcad display of an image big enough to look good in pdf form. at least on my computer, i can only paste in an image that is 600 pixels wide. that will look ok in classic mathcad. however, that looks terrible in pdf. in pdf, i need about 1800 pixels wide to look good. so it's about 3 pages wide to look good in pdf. i also have to use the handles to shrink the 3 page image down to 1 page. this is a pain as it's slow and you have to do a bunch of scrolling. it's basically an issue of mathcad shrinking images with the handles and then not being able to display them well.

what would be nice is if you paste an image wider than one page, it automatically gets scaled down to one page and also looks good from within mathcad. many of the images are not even able to be viewed in mathcad. such as the example i attached to the first post. i think they fixed this in prime but not in classic mathcad.

hopefully that makes sense. it's not an issue of making the pdf. just of viewing an image in mathcad and working with images in mathcad. i also think my 1800 pixels is just for my monitor which is 1366 pixels wide. for people with huge resolutions i think my images will still look like crap in pdf form.

werner was asking about ppi as well. i'm using 72 dpi as that works best for my cad program. so 600 pixels wide fits good on an 8.5 inch wide piece of paper, when using 72 dpi. then 3x that looks good in a pdf on screen.

anthony

i have tried scaling in other programs but the problem is the same. if you take a 1800 pixel image and scale it down to 600. then it's a 600 pixel image. that will look ok in mathcad but terrible in pdf. the only way to work with this issue is to use the handles in mathcad and live with the terrible looking image inside mathcad, knowing it will be fine in pdf. it's challenging to place math over the picture when you can't see the picture. so it's a real pain. i have all the documents made. i was just posting about it, because i haven't seen anyone mention this.