Dear All:

I am building templates for our company: standard, 16x9 etc. One of the templates is destined for Printed Reports only i.e. it will use much smaller fonts and will be formated for paper reading only. I am trying to establish which size I should set my slides at for optimal printing and file management using a colour laser printer (standard office workhorse).

Taking A4 as an example (same issue with US sizes), if I want to set the slide at 300 dots per inch, then it should be 3508 x 2480. This is likely to give me problems with some photos and lots of (non vector) graphics which will need to be blown up way beyond their resolution.

The alternative is to go for 72 dpi equivalent, that is 842 x 595. Would I then get the opposite problem of blurry printing and unsharp fonts?

Any advice from practitioners appreciated!

Thanks

If these reports are ONLY going to be printed, I'd say stick with 300 dpi if you've got photos. You might get away with 200 dpi, but anything less that that will be obviously degraded. Are you using some images that take up the entire page? If so, choose the ones that will yield the best results when printed. I just went through this with a client who had a boatload of older digital photos, some of which were only 640X480 pixels. This works fine on his website, but when he wanted them printed as part of a brochure, it was problematic, to say the least. They simply could not be used at larger sizes. If the pixels aren't there, they aren't there, and no amount of Photoshop magic will fix that. (Despite what you see on CSI!!)

72 dpi would be really bad - obviously pixelated/blurry images, and text would also suffer, so that's not a solution.

Thanks
Yes I guess I'll need to check the limits with a couple of presentations imported from PP...
Will report back. Anyone else with practical experience?

I'm a bit baffled:

I tried out printing files saved at 72, 150, 240 and 300 dpi

1) There is no difference in font crispness or vector graphics (as you would expect)
2) There are only minor differences in rescaled logos, i.e. the resizing appears fairly poor on screen but is OK when printed. Obviously you can't rescale wildly
3) No perceptible difference on photographs - arguably these are all well within pixel constraints

So I'm note sure where the clever compensation is made but, once on paper there is little to choose between the resolutions, even 72 dpi !

4) All files are exactly the same size! The only difference is the zooming level on screen and the need to resize smaller graphics at higher resolutions.

In conclusion I am going for 175.2 dpi, that is the exact size to fill a retina display length-wise with an A4 slide: 2048x1448. At least one thing will be right!