Help Please! Serious Issues with Placing Screen Shots.

Question

Hi,
I'm a long time browser of these forums but this is my first post. I'm pulling my hair out. I've spent hours on this and have a looming deadline. I've a lot of experience in PS and AI but have only started using ID recently. I've searched the forums and web in general, I've found people with similar or the same problems (both on Mac and Windows) but can't find a solution anywhere. I really think there's got to be a simple solution but I can't figure it out.
I'm using ID CS6 on Mac OS X 10.7.5
I've created several mutilpage PDFs (not for print, for screen viewing) in ID using vector graphics from AI without any issue. However, this time I'm trying to create a multipage PDF that will be a tutorial for GarageBand that requires dozens of edited screen shots. When I place the cropped screen shots they come into ID really badly pixelated. I've tried bring them in as several different file types, PNG, BMP, TIFF, JPEG, but all with the same result. I've tried scaling them in different ways and exporting the PDF in different ways but the screen shots still look terrible.
I have the document set up for digital publishing and it's A4 Landscape. I've changed the display performance to High Quality Display but this shouldn't really matter because the exported PDF still has horrible looking screen shots.
Sadly...when I bring the same screen shots into Microsoft Word Mac they look absolutely perfect. I really, REALLY don't want to be forced to use Word to create a tutorial, or anything for that matter.
Can anybody help? Please!
Thanks in advance.
Colm

Answer 1

It seems ludacris and defeats the purpose of the software for me since I hoped to use it mainly for tutorials containing screenshots.
The user interface you are capturing is designed to the monitor pixel grid and captures degrade if you sample them up or down. You can see the resampling problem if you use OSX's zoom feature–zoom in and the interface get's larger but it also blurs.
And extreme example would be a checkerboard drawn at 10 pixels per inch. Increasing the resolution to 300ppi doesn't add any information and degrades the checkerboard's appearance:
When you place a screen capture in ID and scale it, there's no resampling—the capture is resized and the pixels are scaled larger or smaller. If you print the capture it will look fine because a hi-res printer can accurately draw the different scaled resolutions.
When you export to PDF there's going to be a problem displaying the captures in Acrobat because there would only be one zoom level where the original interface pixels display unchanged. It's similar to Photoshop where the screen capture looks best at 100% where the image to monitor ratio is 1:1, but in Acrobat the 1:1 ratio might be any zoom percentage depending on how the capture was resized in ID.