Visio: Fuzzy text
July 16, 2010I created a Visio drawing the other day, and noticed the text was fuzzy on screen (‘fuzzy’ is a technical term!). I checked all the font settings, but nothing appeared to be wrong. I saved the drawing as a PNG using the default settings, then printed it out. It was awful. The text was so fuzzy it was unreadable at the small font size I needed to use.
So I went back to the PNG settings, which you see when you ‘save as’ PNG, and fiddled with them a bit. What worked was changing the output resolution to Print (not Screen), with its default 600 pixels/inch setting — that was all I had to change to get much sharper text.
I tried a Custom resolution setting at 1200 pixels too, but that made very little difference to the print quality of the PNG — all it did was blow the file size of the PNG out to 5 MB from about 500 KB (the 600 setting increased the file size to about 1 MB).
For more details on saving flowcharts as an image, see this updated blog post: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/visio-fuzzy-text-part-two/
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