I’m fairly new to PDF creation. I’ve outputted my share through Illustrator, Photoshop and Quark but have put too much thought in to it as I mostly have not had a need for it. My resume is in PDF and that’s about it. Working on a little beta feature presentation for the Sconex reps I need to up the PDF anti and really make it shine.
Screen shots don’t scale well. When my senior portfolio teacher made me print out 11x17 print outs of my website I was less then pleased at the 200 dpi print out of a 72 dpi file. Damn you internet and your low resolution. A similar problem happens when you save a screen shot to PDF. The default zoom is default to what ever the user’s Acrobat (or in my case Foxit) is set too. This means that if the zoom is set for anything other 100% your screen shot looks like crap and you don’t look very professional.
The trick is to force any PDF reader to open up at 100% so the screen shoot looks as crisp as it does on the site. Most times I’m fairly impressed with Adobe’s help files, but Acrobat’s seem to be rather sparse. Search through google got me no results either.
What you need to look for is the Open Options, which on Acrobat 5 is listed under File > Document Properties > Open Options. Here you can set all the different things you want to happen when anyone opens your PDF. The one I was looking for was the magnification which was set to default and I simply changed it to 100%. Now every one can see my beautiful screenshots with out Acrobat Messing them up.