beamer includegraphics with screenshots

Question

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 1

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.

Answer 2

I have done exactly what you do and e.g defined

\newcommand{\screenshot}[1]{\centerline{%
    \includegraphics[height=7.8cm,transparent]{#1}}}  % 7.8in

which worked with whatever style I was using at the time. The files included with this macro were all PNGs created with one the usual Linux screen capture tools.

Edit: You may have to play with the size (height and width) of your input files. It came out rather nice for me (and this was from a presentation in 2006).

Answer 3

Have you tried to convert the image to .eps or .pdf file and use this file in LaTeX?

Maybe try also latex, dvips and ps2pdf.

Problem might be in used viewer, in Linux I use Document viewer or ePDFViewer and output is much worse than in Adobe Reader or Acrobat, which I use in Windows...

Answer 4

How about scaling it as follows:

\includegraphics[scale=0.5]{images/myimage.jpg}

This works for me.