04-14-2008, 12:32 PM
It sounds like you are trying to use Photoshop to rasterize some formatted text (and probably lines or shaded boxes too). The original material is in vector format and created by a word processor.
First try copying the page of the word processor and pasting it directly into a blank Photoshop document that has been set up to be 300dpi and 9inx11in (or sufficient size to hold your page content).
If that doesn't work, I would create a PDF document like you have done. Make sure that it is of sufficient quality by zooming in a lot when previewing it with a PDF viewer program. Then open it with Photoshop and specify 300dpi in the dialog that comes up when Photoshop opens the PDF file. Such a dialog comes up for me using Photoshop CS2.
If that doesn't work, you can use 'gs' on the Mac OS X Terminal command line to rasterize the PDF page directly. This program is already bundled free with Mac OS X.
Enter the following command one one line substituting your filename for myinputfile.pdf.
gs -dUseCIEColor -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -dUseCropBox -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -r300x300 -dNOPLATFONTS -sDEVICE=pngalpha -dBackgroundColor=16#ffffff -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -sOutputFile=myoutput.png myinputfile.pdf
This will create a 300dpi PNG file named myoutput.png. You can convert the PNG to TIFF using Preview.app or Photoshop if you desire.
There is probably a ghostscript DEVICE selection to convert directly to TIFF, but since I copied and pasted this off of a How-To page, I don't know it offhand.
First try copying the page of the word processor and pasting it directly into a blank Photoshop document that has been set up to be 300dpi and 9inx11in (or sufficient size to hold your page content).
If that doesn't work, I would create a PDF document like you have done. Make sure that it is of sufficient quality by zooming in a lot when previewing it with a PDF viewer program. Then open it with Photoshop and specify 300dpi in the dialog that comes up when Photoshop opens the PDF file. Such a dialog comes up for me using Photoshop CS2.
If that doesn't work, you can use 'gs' on the Mac OS X Terminal command line to rasterize the PDF page directly. This program is already bundled free with Mac OS X.
Enter the following command one one line substituting your filename for myinputfile.pdf.
gs -dUseCIEColor -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=1 -dUseCropBox -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -r300x300 -dNOPLATFONTS -sDEVICE=pngalpha -dBackgroundColor=16#ffffff -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -sOutputFile=myoutput.png myinputfile.pdf
This will create a 300dpi PNG file named myoutput.png. You can convert the PNG to TIFF using Preview.app or Photoshop if you desire.
There is probably a ghostscript DEVICE selection to convert directly to TIFF, but since I copied and pasted this off of a How-To page, I don't know it offhand.