beamer includegraphics with screenshots

rdoubleui picture rdoubleui · Jan 7, 2010 · Viewed 44.2k times · Source

I'm using the LaTeX-Beamer class for making presentations. Every once in a while I need to include screenshots. Those graphics are pixel-based, of course. I use includegraphics like this:

\begin{figure}
   \includegraphics[width= \paperwidth]{img/analyzer.png}
\end{figure}

or usually something like this:

\begin{figure}
   \includegraphics[width= 0.8\linewidth]{img/analyzer.png}
\end{figure}

This leads to pretty bad readibility of the contained text, so I'm asking for your best practices: How would you include screenshots containing text considering, that I will do the output PDF with pdflatex?

EDIT: I suppose I'm looking for something like an 1:1 presetation of the image within beamer. However, [scale = 1.0] doesn't achieve what I'm looking for.

Answer

Alok Singhal picture Alok Singhal · Jan 8, 2010

Your best bet is to scale the image outside of Latex for inclusion, and include it in 1:1 ratio. The scaling done by graphics packages in Latex isn't going to be anywhere near as good as possible from other tools. Latex (Tex) has limited floating-point arithmetic capabilities, whereas an external tool can use sophisticated algorithms to get the scaling better.

Another option is to use only a part of the screenshot, the one you want to concentrate on.

Edit: If you can change the font size before taking the screenshot, that's another option—just increase the font size for the screenshots.

Of course, you can combine the two methods.