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I'm looking for a quite robust solution for printing/converting MS Word documents to high quality PDF's.

I tried built-in export function and it works for hyperlinks, but image quality is not satisfactory. I set the high quality in MS Office advanced settings, but still it isn't what I look for.

I also tried PDF Creator which allows to print documents in 300 DPI, but unfortunately it doesn't preserve hyperlinks.

Do you have any successful work flow for such activty? Unfortunately, I can't use LaTeX in this project. Perhaps exporting PDF's twice -- via Word and via PDF Creator -- and then overlaying one onto another could solve this. But I don't know how to do that.

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  • Just to clarify, are you looking for a free solution? Also, what is the end purpose of these documents? Are you wanting 300DPI because they're going to be professionally printed, or is there another purpose in mind? Finally, are you looking for an ongoing solution, or do you only need to PDF a certain number of docs?
    – Monomeeth
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 10:51
  • I would like to have free solution, perhaps open-source. Documents are for internet publishing, but it's important to me to have good image quality. It could be one time solution but some kind of automatisation is welcome. I have about 20 of documents to publish.
    – Dominik Roszkowski
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 11:34

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Firstly, I should point out that 300dpi is total overkill for internet publishing. 300dpi is the quality often used for commercial printing (e.g. printing presses, etc). Depending on the number of pages your PDF documents are, filling them with 300dpi images will also add considerably to their file size.

Secondly, if you're finding that the quality of PDFs produced by MS Word is such that the images do not meet your standards, then the problem may be with your original images. Are they of the quality you need? If the original images don't meet the standard, then their quality is not going to upscale very well.

All that said, if you only have about twenty documents to produce, you could opt to just take advantage of a free Adobe Creative Cloud trial. You could then use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC that will allow you to either print to Adobe PDF, or to export using the Adobe Acrobat plugin that is installed in MS Office. Either way you will be able to produce PDFs of varying quality (even press quality PDFs used for commercial printing). This option also preserves any hyperlinks you have.

Otherwise, some popular open source options are:

NOTE: I can't personally vouch for the above open source options as I'm an Adobe Acrobat user, but I do know of people who are happy with them.

[EDIT]

I forgot to mention LibreOffice. You could try its LibreOffice Writer app to either:

  • open one of your MS Word docs and export to PDF to do a comparison of the quality
  • create a test document including a couple of hyperlinks and a couple of images and export to PDF to compare quality
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  • Using Adobe Acrobat Pro may work for me, but I hope to repeat the process in few weeks. Perhaps I could use another account then, but I assume that it would violate the license. Thanks for the answer :)
    – Dominik Roszkowski
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 20:18
  • I forgot to mention LibreOffice, so have added it to my answer. Your question doesn't specify what version of MS Word you're using? Since you referenced PDF Creator I know it's a Windows version, but which one? I have published hundreds (maybe thousands) of documents using both the Windows and Mac versions of MS Word and wonder why you're having issues with image quality? Seems to me that perhaps you need to address that issue, as MS Word (especially 2010 and above) already offers a robust solution for converting MS Word documents to high quality PDFs. What types of images are you using?
    – Monomeeth
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 20:58
  • I use the current Office 365 so it's Word 2016 16.0.7426.1015. I think the problem is in the jpg compression and is visible for example in this comparison - Word on the right. Perhaps I'm a bit too obsessive about it, but if it's achievable, then I would like to try it.
    – Dominik Roszkowski
    Commented Nov 21, 2016 at 22:04
  • You are probably being a bit too obsessive, but that's okay. :) Are these your images, or have they been provided to you? I'm just wondering how much flexibility there is in what you have to work with, because looking at the images in your comparison it's highly likely that the original images were in some sort of vector format (e.g. .eps, .svg, .ai. .cdr, etc) and were drawn using software such as Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw. If these have been provided to you, perhaps you could ask for 300dpi .tif versions of the images instead and give these a go in your Word docs.
    – Monomeeth
    Commented Nov 22, 2016 at 4:40
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I think PrimoPDF will do what you want. It's closed-source, but free.

I created a test document with a link to google.com and a hi-res photograph and it came out with the link functional and the image in what appears to be original resolution.

I used the Custom color/downsampling option (click to enlarge):

Main PrimoPDF dialog

It had already defaulted to "No Downsampling":

"Custom" dialog

In the Options dialog (button in lower left of the main dialog), under Creation > PDF settings I increased PDF Resolution to 300:

"Options" dialog, PDF settings options

I'm not sure if that last PDF Resolution setting is important, though, because I got the same result when I generated the PDF with it set to 25. <shrug> Turning on downsampling definitely had an effect on the image quality, though.

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