Quality issues with uploaded documents

The quality of a document (PDF, MS Office) you uploaded is not good enough. What can you do?

Background information

  • All documents are rendered as PNG images.
  • PDFs are rendered as very high resolution PNG with up to 20000 px for the larger side. Since a PDF is a vector image, its native quality will ALWAYS be better, especially if you zoom into the image.
  • When you download the document we will return the original file format, like PDF or pptx.
    When you extract a page it will show as a PNG. When you download that extracted page it will still be a PNG.

Best practices

To get the most out of your imported document try the following:

  • Avoid very detailed documents where you would need to zoom in a lot/ make the PNG image very large to see the details.
  • If you need the details, open the document in some viewer supporting the format, zoom in, make a snapshot of that section and upload it to your board.

You can also convert your vector PDF into a rasterized image using a third party app like https://www.xpdfreader.com/download.html. It's very lightweight and you can specify the output resolution as dpi. Try a PNG at 300 to 600 dpi. Higher resolution might result in slow canvas rendering + the image loading time might run into a timeout on web applications like Collaboard resulting in a Collaboard error:

When you are done with the extraction, simply upload the extracted rasterized image to your board.