Illustrations
How to achieve high-quality images with our text editor.Quick guide
- The image should be uploaded as an svg or jpg file.
- Make sure your image has a density of at least 300 dpi (dots per inch).
- You can determine the size of the images yourself.
- Check if the program with which you create the image has a direct export function to a jpg file format, in which you can directly define the image quality.
- Don’t use screenshots!
- If you are unsure, check the print quality with a printout on a laser printer.
Our text editor lets you upload tables or pictures as an image. We will explain to you here how you can achieve print-ready quality in the format template you have chosen.
Upload the image as jpg or svg
Our text editor supports svg files, which will always put you on the safe side when it comes to image quality. You can find an online tool for converting jpg to svg here. In any case we recommend that you use jpg files rather than png files, as the latter are optimised for online use and may still cause printing problems.
Three hundred dpi is essential
The most important thing for the integration of print-ready images with SciFlow is the image resolution, which should be at least 300 dpi. To check this, right click on your jpg or png file, select “Properties” and then click on the “Details” tab. If 300 dpi is specified for horizontal and vertical resolution, you are on the safe side.
You can determine the size of the images yourself
The size of your images has nothing to do with the number of dots per inch; rather, you can choose what size you want. Free tools such as Gimp and paid tools such as Photoshop help you crop and scale your images to the ideal size. Our text editor works in such a way that the images are reduced in size in the editor itself, but are then displayed in the format template you selected in the way you originally uploaded them. We recommend that you print out the corresponding pages (see last point) and adjust the image size accordingly if an image on a page seems too large or too small.
Check if the program you are working with has a direct jpg export function
If you notice that the quality of your image is too poor (i.e. less than 300 dpi), check if the program you created the image with has a direct export function for jpg. These can usually be found in the “Export” tab, but in some programs they can also be found in the “Print” or “Save as” tab. In such cases, you can usually set the export image quality yourself.
Word, for example, does not yet have this function. What you can do in recent versions of Word (e.g. Word 2010 and above) is to save the document as a pdf file. With many pdf editing programs such as Adobe Acrobat and PDF XChange Editor you can then create a jpg in a second step, in which you can set the horizontal and vertical resolution in dpi.
Don’t use screenshots!
Unfortunately, screenshots rarely produce sufficient image quality for printing. In most cases, the images generated in this way have 72 dpi. You can increase this slightly, e.g. by zooming in on the screen, but it’s still difficult to reach the necessary resolution of 300 dpi. So make sure you have the original files and convert them into jpg or svg files with the tips mentioned above.
Print out the corresponding pages of your thesis with images
To be on the safe side, as a last step we recommend that you print out at least the relevant pages of your thesis with the images and check them. First, you can then see whether the size of the individual images is correct or whether you still have to make adjustments. And second, you can see if the images seem too blurred to you. Of course your laser printer at home isn’t as powerful as a printer in a print shop, but if you no longer notice anything here, it’s unlikely that more powerful printers will have any trouble with your images.