We have noted that the .PDF output from Excel is not very good in certain
instances. In a number of special cases basic fills or patterns do not
convert well. For example, we have a number of spreadsheets that use thin
diagonal stripped and gray screen (12%) pattern fills to highlight certain
cells. However, when these worksheets are published to a .PDF file, the
patterns are grossly enlarged and present themselves as thick diagonal lines
or as large polka dots. The refinement of the original fills is completely
lost.

This is odd, given that many other meticulous attributes remain intact
during the conversion. Does anyone have a recommendation as to how we can
preserve the quality of the fill patterns when publishing to a .PDF file?
Is there an Excel option or a .PDF printing option that might control this
aspect of the conversion?

How are you creating the .PDF file? If you have Adobe Acrobat installed and
"Adobe PDF" is one of your printer options, you should be able to play around
with the printer properties to perhaps change the output. It may just take
experimenting with th settings.

I've got Adobe Acrobat 7 Pro on this system and when I choose to print to
'Adobe PDF' and click printer properties, there is an Adobe PDF Settings tab,
and one area on it is "Default Settings:" and that's where I'd start --
clicking its [Edit...] button pulls up a window with numerous options,
including separate settings for Images and Color. I'd start in the color
section. Sorry, I'm not enough of an Acrobat user to really make specific
recommendations.

Also, which version of Excel do you use?

"Blue Max" wrote:

We have noted that the .PDF output from Excel is not very good in certain
instances. In a number of special cases basic fills or patterns do not
convert well. For example, we have a number of spreadsheets that use thin
diagonal stripped and gray screen (12%) pattern fills to highlight certain
cells. However, when these worksheets are published to a .PDF file, the
patterns are grossly enlarged and present themselves as thick diagonal lines
or as large polka dots. The refinement of the original fills is completely
lost.

This is odd, given that many other meticulous attributes remain intact
during the conversion. Does anyone have a recommendation as to how we can
preserve the quality of the fill patterns when publishing to a .PDF file?
Is there an Excel option or a .PDF printing option that might control this
aspect of the conversion?

.