'Fuzzy' when converting TIFF/PNG to PCL

[jmatthies]

I feel like this is a dumb question, and I hope it is. I have spent a while looking through the Usage guide and Command-line manual to try and find guidance; but I don't know what I am looking for so my searches are all across the board.

convert on Windows 7: version 6.7.1-8 2011-08-16 Q16

I have a simple image that was first created in Word, then apparently saved as a tif by my boss. The image looks 'good' when viewed as a tif or saved as a PNG. But when I convert it via c:\> convert T.tif T.pcl and then copy it to Linux and cat it to a LaserJet with / # cat T.pcl | lpr -oraw - the printed image comes up fuzzy; as if I was zooming in 50% from ms paint. That's about as technical as I can get... I am new to this image processing world. The purpose of converting to PCL is to incorporate the LOGO into our PCL6 data stream. The PCL can currently be incorporated into the stream, but the logo is awfully fuzzy.

I have tried some command-line options (adaptive-sharpen, adaptive-resize) , but they had no result and I'm quite certain it is because I have no idea what I am doing.

This is such a simple task, that I feel like I'm missing a glaringly obvious command line option. The image is nothing fancy, just a couple of drawn lines and then some text. I have thought about ditching the source TIF and trying to use convert to draw the lines and caption the text myself; but that may be getting ahead of myself and goes down a completely separate path. I would like to figure this out, because there will probably be subsequent requests from my boss to convert other, more complicated logos to PCL.

[anthony]

PCL is a vector graphics (lines and shapes) file format. While PNG and TIFF are raster (pixel array) file format. The big difference is that rasters are for a specific resolution or pixel density such as displays (low), printers (high), photography (very high), while vectors can scale as the lines can be drawn at any resolution that is needed.

Any raster image that is small for display resolutions generally come out dotty (See Blocking Artefacts).

The best idea is to try and convert the image to a vector format such as SVG first then use a vector to vector convertor to convert to PCL. A program that can do this is "autotrace". For examples see
Raster to Vector Converter
http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/transform/#edge_vector

Note it is best done with a bitmap or thresholded image, so as to simplify the data that the vectorization needs to study.