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3 Replies Last post: May 30, 2005 11:42 AM by Sherewshevsky

Sherewshevsky

3 posts since
May 28, 2005

May 28, 2005 1:26 PM

Scanning Mag Page for Keynote Presentation

I'm planning a presentation using Keynote to an audience of appox 100 people. I plan to show an image that is a magazine page of 8.5 x 11 inches, which includes a lot of text on the magazine page. I hope the audience will be able to read at least the larger sized text.

At what resolution must I scan the magazine page for best quality when projected onto a screen in the conference room? One person told me 72 dpi, another said 150 dpi, and yet a nother said 300 dpi!

Please help.

JCheyne

250 posts since
Aug 9, 2002

1. May 28, 2005 8:32 PM

in response to: Sherewshevsky

Re: Scanning Mag Page for Keynote Presentation

Copyright issues aside, a standard magazine page's type is too small to be read as a whole page when projected, but you may be able to zoom in and view a portion at a time. To keep the page at a reasonable resolution when enlarged, I would scan it as a .tiff image at 300 dpi, then import the image into an image processing application (such as Photoshop) and save readable panels of the image as JPGs.

For presentation, I would have one Keynote slide that shows the whole page for the sake of context, and then have several Keynote slides showing, say, a paragraph at a time, for as much of the text as you would want the audience to read. If applied carefully, Keynote's transitions would make this a very clear and dynamic presentation.

moose_n_squirrel

2,886 posts since
Sep 16, 2004

2. May 28, 2005 8:47 PM

in response to: Sherewshevsky

Re: Scanning Mag Page for Keynote Presentation

In reply to:<hr />
At what resolution must I scan the magazine page for best quality when projected onto a screen in the conference room? One person told me 72 dpi, another said 150 dpi, and yet a nother said 300 dpi!

<hr />

they're all wrong.

When you're dealing with a projector, you can't deal in dpi because that means dots per inch and there are no inches on a projector, its all measured in pixels. Switch the scanner ruler from inches to pixels when scanning the entire page and measure it that way. The projector could be 1024x768 or 800x600 but if you're really unlucky it wil be 640x480. 480 to 768 pixels high is not good for reading a whole magazine page legibly.

On the other hand, that only applies if the page can't be zoomed. Does Keynote allow zooming into high resolution images during a presentation? Try it. If it works, go ahead and scan it at 300dpi and zoom in when you want the audience to read something. If that won't work, take the same scan and open it in Preview or Acrobat which will let you zoom in and switch between that and Keynote.

Otherwise you can do what JCheyne said and do it in sections so the text is big enough to be read. A good way to test: If you plug your Mac into your TV and you can read the presentation, it should work well on the projector. (PowerBooks/iBooks plug into TVs very easily if you didn't lose the adapter from the box.)

Sherewshevsky

3 posts since
May 28, 2005

3. May 30, 2005 11:42 AM

in response to: moose_n_squirrel

Re: Scanning Mag Page for Keynote Presentation

Allow me to clarify a little:

I'd like the headlines and subheads on the 8 x 10 inch page to be as sharp as possible, not so much the body copy text.

Also, the quality of the photos on the page are less important than the headlines and subheads.

I'd PREFER the audience to be able to see the entire page. But i don't mind scaning portions of the page to emphasize certain areas.

To have the audience see the ENTIRE page, seems to me I should scan the page at 128 dpi since 1024 divided by 8 inches equals 128. Is this correct?

And if I wanted to scan a portion of the page, I'd do similar math to determine what dpi to scan that portion of the page at. Is that right?

Also, it would seem best to save the file as a high quality gif, or even as a png, rather than jpeg because i'm more intereested in the text, which is essentially line art with perhaps having spot color (not a continuous tone). Am I correct?

Thank you.

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May 28, 2005 1:26 PM

Scanning Mag Page for Keynote Presentation

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