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I'm on Ubuntu. I took a screenshot that contains numbers, but I can't see any of the numbers when I insert the image into a LibreOffice document.

Screenshot:

screenshot

How can I make this image more clear?

I need to be able to read numbers on the image clearly .

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9
  • Use a comment to post a link to the image at a sharing site like imgur.com (you can probably post the link in the question, itself).
    – fixer1234
    Sep 1, 2016 at 16:03
  • thanks , but is there anything i wrote to take downvote ! ?
    – user1
    Sep 2, 2016 at 7:22
  • Looks like you need a dropbox account to access the image (I get an error message). Super User uses imgur.com, which is a free image sharing site. You might want to copy them there and post a link. There's no way to know for sure why somebody downvoted the question. Maybe they thought it was unclear. Also, asking for a software recommendation is off-topic. Just ask how to solve the problem. If software is needed, people will mention that in their answers.
    – fixer1234
    Sep 2, 2016 at 7:56
  • StackExchange uses Imgur for image storage. Upload your image(s) to Imgur and you will get link(s) you can share. Edit your question to include the link(s) and someone with sufficient reputation will inline the image(s) for you.
    – DavidPostill ♦
    Sep 2, 2016 at 9:55
  • @user1, it would be very useful if you can also add a (link to a) screenshot of the image within the LO Writer document so people can see exactly what the issue is. Also, clarify if the problem is just the size of the letters vs. visibility of the reverse color letters in the nodes. Also, clarify whether the issue is trying to read the embedded diagram on the screen in Writer vs. on the printed output.
    – fixer1234
    Sep 2, 2016 at 15:24

2 Answers 2

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2

I assume that the image simply was scaled down from its original size, which lost fine detail.

To get around that problem, crop the image to only the necessary region of interest (not the whole desktop, if you can avoid it!) and resize it to 100% (or whichever you can get away with in your document).

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2
  • this is, of course, a bugger, since it's so wide. when printed, it should look better than on the screen, though. but we're not really talking about an arbitrary screenshot, but a graph from some application; can't you recreate it with a bigger font?
    – ths
    Sep 2, 2016 at 8:55
  • unfortunatly , i submitted data then took screen shoot and to do this agian means to submit the data again and it's hard to do that .
    – user1
    Sep 2, 2016 at 9:01
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If you take a screenshot of a 1980x1020 monitor and have 16px text at "100%", a single glyph of the text itself is going to be a max of 16px high and maybe 12-18px wide.

If Libre Office is like Word (very likely) then the internal rendering size of a page is going to be 250-300ppi at standard paper size (i.e. 8.5 x 11). They then scale it for presentation to you at the screen resolution/zoom level that you have set.

The full screen shot at 100% pixel size is going to be 3.6 inches (1080/300), but that 16px glyph of type rendered at 100% pixel size is going to be (16/300= .05 inches).

So usually people scale up the image and this reduces quality severely, the larger you go. Bear in mind the 16px glyph is mostly white space and the lines and curves are only made up of a handful of individual pixels. The general rule of thumb for professional printing is to not scale up more than 2x or down more than .5x

So the problem is not scaling down a high-res image, but scaling up a low res one, and again, what matters here is not the total size or resolution of the image, but the number of pixels used to resolve the type that you are interested in.

If you want to get the type more clear, zoom in on the type as far as you can to fill the screen, then take the capture. You now have 1080px of type instead of 16px. The zooming difference here is that you are using math-based vector images (fonts) which scale "infinitely" and then fixing the resolution in a screen capture.

If you cannot zoom or need the whole screen at once, then use the highest resolution your monitor will support, presuming you have high-dpi aware scaling enabled in the OS.

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4
  • Don't increase the resolution, increase the type size. You will not be able to place your image on a standard sheet of paper where the text is large enough to read. In addition, try exporting your image as PNG rather than JPG. PNG compression handles solid color graphic elements better.
    – Yorik
    Sep 2, 2016 at 14:43
  • Even better than PNG is to export as SVG, but then you must export it rather than take a screenshot.
    – Yorik
    Sep 2, 2016 at 14:45
  • unfortunatly , i submitted data then took screenshot and to do this agian means to submit the data again and it's hard to do that . is there any possible solution i can try it ? can i do in photoshop or make filter or something ?
    – user1
    Sep 2, 2016 at 15:38
  • remake it by hand. Use Inkscape for vector or GIMP for "regular" images (both are open source). Vector images from Inkscape will scale to different sizes with better quality (I would use Inkscape). Place the image on a layer in your image software, then make new circles in the proper places, make the arrows, place the type larger so that it is legible. Delete the original image from the document, then save/export for later use.
    – Yorik
    Sep 2, 2016 at 15:43

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