AutoCAD TIF output quality Experiments

Since I don't really understand the relationship between DPI, PPI, image size, color mode, and the image quality, I decided to test them out by myself. Although it took me a whole nigh last night, I thought it is worth doing. Now I do know how to get a .TIF image with good quality (no blurry edges of letters and lines) and appropriate image size (several thousand pixels in each dimension, and the file size is about several tens MB).

Here's some tricks what I found out:

1. Scale down the drawing in AutoCAD. This won't decrease the image quality. Actually this can help decrease the file size of the output .TIF file. I used same settings for two prints, one is 10 times scaled up of the other one. And the two files are ~2MB and ~70MB respectively.

2. Use smaller print size in AutoCAD. At first I though I should print a very large size, maybe A2 or A1, to get a good image. Actually this has nothing to do with the image quality. When this size is large, the final .TIF image will be very large. I got a 10,000*10,000 pixel .TIF and my computer got stuck!

3. Usually 600dpi or 720dpi will be good enough.

4. Use 24Bit color. Other color mode doesn't work as well as 24Bit color.

AutoCAD 2009 TIF output poor quality ! Problem solved!

I was drawing a system sketch for one of my journal article in AutoCAD 2009 and was trying to export it to .TIF file because it is required by the journal. However, the .TIF file I got by using TIFOUT command in AutoCAD 2009 was really of low quality-the image is blurry, and the text can not be seen in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer (but can be seen in Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft picture manager, which is very weird).

So I tried many many ways, including use other command, such as PNGOUT, JPGOUT, to make other type of image and tried to convert them into .TIF. But I failed.

Now the reason of the problem is clear: AutoCAD has a crappy driver for .TIF output. And here's the solution: install the free PDFCREATOR! This free software is so handy, that I can set the output file type, size, and resolution. It is not only a PDF creator, but can used to print all kinds of other types.

I loev PDFCREATOR!