I have a large and complex Word 365 document containing a large number of full-page images. All the original images have resolutions of over 300ppi. However, I have manually extended the images beyond the page boundaries to achieve the desired size and framing. In every case the resolutions of the stretched/resized images remains greater than 250ppi.

I have turned off image compression and selected high fidelity images but the images still appear to have had their resolutions reduced by Word when the file is saved, and some resolutions are eventually reduced below 200ppi.

How can I tell Word to leave the images exactly as set when inserted into the document?

Can anyone help with this? I have tried Bullzip etc but all the potential solutions I can find either have a built-in resolution limitation or require the purchase of an expensive license - such as Adobe Acrobat.

What is the point of Word having settings for high fidelity and no image compression when the created PDF still shows considerable image compression - or am I missing something?

I've had no luck with SaveAs to create PDFs with high-res graphics. I did search around the net and explored various suggestions but nothing seems to have improved my outputs as yet. I tried vba, compatibility modes and registry settings but those failed to improve things with the current version of Word.

I suspect buying Acrobat and using PDFMaker would work but its not a good option across a broader company so I'm still looking for a configuration option like it 'used to' work in earlier versions of Word.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

Hmm,

In Word's Advanced options, I checked the 'do not compress images in this file' option and chose 'High fidelity' as the default resolution.

I then inserted a 7.37Mb image into the document, scaling the image to as large as Word would accept (~31% - it can't save anything to a finished size that is more than 55.88cm wide/high), then saved it. The saved file size was just over 8Mb. Resizing the image had no effect on the file size with subsequent saves, or on the apparent resolution of the embedded image.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Paul

The issue is not in the Word document itself but in the image quality after doing a SaveAs to PDF. In earlier versions of Word we could get good image quality from a SaveAs to PDF so this problem is a recent thing.

Making the image bigger reduces its pixel density (reduces the dots per inch) so if you made it big enough (DPI is less than 200) then the resulting PDF might preserve all the pixels from the original.

In general, photographs at 200dpi is adequate for both screen and print, however if your documents have computer graphics with small text or line art on high contrast backgrounds then 200dpi is not good enough.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

The OP's profile says he/she's using Office 2013, so 'a recent thing' shouldn't start affecting that over a decade later.

Does 'printing' the document to PDF make a difference?

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Their post starts with "Word 365 document" so I assumed the profile version is not correct.

Printing to PDF results are variable.
If I choose the "Microsoft Print to PDF" driver then Word diverts to the Export settings - same poor result as SaveAs
If other 3rd party PDF printer drivers are loaded (my work machine has Nuance PowerPDF) I can get bigger resultant PDF file sizes but not the bookmarks I also need (navigation pane of heading structure).
I don't have the Adobe Acrobat loaded so I can't test that but I would hope that it still gives both bookmarks and high-res graphics.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia