Pdfs become low resolution when pasted into LibreOffice Impress presentation

[JuicyToots]

I’m trying to put together a presentation which includes some diagrams that I have made and saved as pdfs. They were made using vector graphics, so there should really be no loss of quality. Indeed, opening the pdfs in a document viewer shows me a diagram that looks sharp at any zoom. However, when I paste these pdfs onto a LibreOffice Impress slide, they are always blurry.

Here is what my diagram looks like when opened in my computer’s document viewer:

And here is what the same diagram looks like in my Impress presentation:

I have no idea what is causing this, and have never had any such issues with Powerpoint or Google Slides.

[anon73440385]

You are on which operating system using which LibreOffice version (please show information from Help -> About LibreOffice

[JuicyToots]

I’m using this on Pop! OS.

The version information from About LibreOffice is:
Version: 7.0.5.2
Build ID: 00(Build:2)
CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 5.11; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: en-AU (en_AU.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Ubuntu package version: 1:7.0.5-0ubuntu0.20.10.1
Calc: threaded

[JuicyToots]

Is there a way to change this? Can you force LibreOffice to save vector details? A large portion of the diagrams I make use vector graphics. My current workaround is to just convert all of the PDFs into PNGs, but that doesn’t feel like a very elegant solution to me.

[EarnestAl]

You could open the pdf with Draw and copy the contents from there to Impress. You might need to re-group shapes once placed in Impress as groupings (but not elements) seem to be lost.

[vsfoote]

PDF are inserted with the chrome project’s pdfium libs as bitmap only. Default resolution has been 96dpi since the 5.3.0 release (tdf#1158110).

However at 7.2.0 release you are now able to set an os environment variable – PDFIMPORT_RESOLUTION_DPI – that will control the import filter (values of 300 or 1200dpi work well). While work on trunk agains 7.3.0 is tweaking export/printing for the image from the embedded PDF.

The pdfium libs support a skia backend canvas for rendering PDF to vector, but LO is only parsing out to bitmap for now. Possible future enhancement along with better UI for dealing with external PDF pages as image source.