Rendering PDFs and Office documents with IMatch Design & Print

[BanjoTom]

I've only played a small amount with the great "Design and Print" functions of IMatch, and have made some simple dynamic templates that I like a lot.

But -- when/if I send PDF files or Word documents (for example) to Design and Print, they do show up, but with very low resolution or blurry text.  I realize that there would naturally be problems with lengthy multipage Word (or PDF) files, but this happens even with 1-page files.  Is there any workaround, short of turning the first page of such documents into an image by printing it or doing a screen-capture?   

[Mario]

I don't follow. What do you mean with

when/if I send PDF files or Word documents (for example) to Design and Print

Do you attempt to include PDF or Word documents in a Design & Print document?
Remember: IMatch creates thumbnails and cache images for PDF / Word files using the thumbnail services provided by Windows. This produces previews in sizes between 300 and 2000 pixels - depending on whatever preview module is installed, Office version, Acrobat version etc.

These previews are usually sufficient for IMatch thumbnails and maybe the Quick View Panel.
But if you plan to print these inside IMatch D&P, you will either end up with very small or larger but low-res results. A 800 pixel PDF preview is good for maybe 1 or 2 inches in printing.

[BanjoTom]

Yes, I was trying to include PDF and Word documents in a Design & Print document. 

The reason: I have a folder with many "Family History" files in it, including not only JPG and TIFF images, but also some PDF and Office documents, and a few text files as well.  I had been thinking of creating a Design & Print document with all the files in that folder plus explanatory metadata, so that I could print that as another PDF and thereby share it with distant members of my family. 

But it should not be a great problem to simply use Design and Print to work with only the image files in that folder, and then create PDFs of the other (non-image) files separately and finally to compile them into a single PDF that would be relatively compact and easy to share. 

Thanks for the clarification, Mario!

[Mario]

This can work if IMatch is able to extract previews large enough from PDF and Office documents.
For PDF files, the installed Acrobar component usually can produce previews up to 2000 pixel. I think that's the maximum size IMatch attempts to extract, and then it goes down until the Windows functions returns a preview image.

For Office documents, Windows extracts the embedded preview in the Office document. And the size of this depends on the Office version, but is usually only 300 pixel or so. That's not really enough for printing.

What you could do would be to produce larger 'representation' of your Office document (e.g. export a key page as a JPEG or print the Office document into a PDF) and then make this file a version of the Office document. Mark the version as "For Printing" and then Design & Print will use the proxy image / PDF when printing your Office document.