imagemagick - generated PDFs are blurry/hazy

Question

I have an image of a website which I'm trying to convert to PDF. I have the image in several formats: PSD, PNG, JPG, TIFF, all saved losslessly.

I'm using the following command to convert the image to PDF:

convert -density 93 foo.jpg bar.pdf

Here is part of the original image:

And here is the same part, after converting to PDF:

As you can see, the second one is ever so slightly hazy. What's causing this, and how can I eliminate it? I've seen PDFs with crisp graphics, so I know it's possible.

Answer 1

If you are seeing the same results with multiple input types. The fuzziness is likely being caused by the anti-aliasing feature of your PDF Viewer. If using Acrobat, you can turn off image anti-aliasing by doing the following:

Go to Edit-->Preferences-->Page Display

Untick the option "Smooth Images" and hit "OK".

The crisp graphics you are seeing on other PDFs are likely due to the fact that they are vectorized graphics. Imagemagick is creating a PDF and embedding your image inside of it which may be subject to compression.

Also:

When using jpeg as input, add the "-quality 100" to your Imagemagick call to retain the highest quality possible.

Use a higher value for the "-density" parameter (I would recommend at least 150) to generate a higher resolution PDF.