Hi, I'm writing a report and inserting a few raster images in (in PNG format) using:
\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
\includegraphics[width=4in]{poker.png}
My problem is that when saving as a PDF the images are look really awful, am I missing something?
Cheers!
Are you viewing the PDF in original size? And is the image included in the document in it's original size? Resizing the image can result in awful images.
I do the exact thing all the time, and it always looks good.
Perhaps it is the pdf viewer that renders it badly? (I use xpdf mostly.)
Maybe you can post screenshots of the image, and how it looks in the pdf document?
I've always had the same problem, but the print is always fine. The only solution I know is to use vectorial images, but it's not always possible.
To me the problem juste comes from the fact the PDF viewer scales the image badly. There are often strange things like this, for example some capitals look wrong with Adobe's viewer, but once it's printed the result is always fine.
(You don't need to put the .png extension in the file name: graphicx automatically looks for the image with that name which has the best quality.)
Years ago I had similar problem. The solution was to use directly pdflatex, instead of latex and dvipdf.
Alternative was to convert PNG to EPS.