Custom symbols print at poor resolution

Question

I have imported several custom symbols from SVG files.  These appear fine at high zoom levels in yEd but seem to print out (or export to PDF) as low-resolution images.  The same thing occurs with the built-in SVG symbols.  Example:

Graphml: http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/~cpbruton/documents/yed/print_example.graphml
Exported PDF: http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/~cpbruton/documents/yed/print_example.pdf
Screenshot of zoomed-in area in yEd: http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/~cpbruton/documents/yed/print_screen.png

And here is a screenshot of the exported PDF opened in Preview:

Note that all the text and lines look good, and the FGRplus (grey rectangle) looks good.  The remaining symbols are blurry.  The same thing happens when I print directly.  I am using yEd 3.9.2 on Mac OS X 10.6.8.

Answer 1

SVGs support special antaliasing and gradients that yEd's PDF export cannot reproduce. Each time the PDF export encounters such a feature, it creates and embeds a raster image into the PDF. This is a shortcoming of yEd's PDF export. The really bad news is that FreeHEP VectorGraphics (the library used for PDF creation in yEd) is no longer maintained by its creators. In other words, the situation will not improve any time soon.

However, printing should not be affected.

Comments

Thanks for your answer.  Does this happen with all SVG symbols or just those with incompatible features? I didn't realize that my symbols contained such things but I will try to recreate them without.

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Unless your SVGs consist only of vertical and horizontal line segments, you are probably out of luck with recreating your SVGs in such a way that PDF export handles them well. A better approach would be to export to SVG and if absolutely necessary find another tool to convert SVG to PDF.

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Since printing should not be affected, using a PDF printer driver to create PDFs without these artifacts should also be possible. A good and free one for Windows is PDFCreator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/), for Mac OS, I'm not sure, maybe PDFWriter (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfwriterformac/).