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 Blurry / low quality text in visualizations

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Martin Poulsen's profile image
Martin Poulsen posted Fri September 26, 2025 05:34 AM

I'm creating a report with many visualizations. One page contains six bar charts arranged in three rows and two columns.

When I run the report as a PDF, the text inside the visualizations is significantly lower quality than the rest of the text.

What can i do to make it look nicer on the PDF (and on print) ?

I have tried changing the font and font size, but it hasn't helped.

Jeremy Aude's profile image
Jeremy Aude posted Mon September 29, 2025 08:51 AM  Best Answer

Hi Martin, I posted a related discussion a few days back: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/discussion/111-visualization-quality-in-pdf

From IBM support:

11.1 visualizations are rendered as PNGs in PDF so they pixelate a bit. This happens whether the PDF is viewed in Cognos or downloaded and viewed using Adobe. Chart visualizations are rendered as vector graphics in PDF so they are scaled correctly. This is already know and we do have an internal feature request put in to improve the quality of this visualization.

So use the "Charts" version if you want pixel-perfect. One would expect the newer versions to be better, but not in this case.

It would be helpful if IBM would note this somewhere in the chart selection window. Maybe it is in the documentation somewhere but I haven't seen it. I don't know about you, but it would have saved me quite a bit of time if I knew this ahead of time. 

Patrick Neveu's profile image
Patrick Neveu IBM Champion posted Mon September 29, 2025 08:26 AM

Hi Martin,

Which version do you use? If you are using v11.2 or v12, did you try with among the following visualizations?

Best regards,

Martin Poulsen's profile image
Martin Poulsen posted Mon September 29, 2025 08:34 AM

Hi Patrick,

The graph shown is an 11.1 visualization. This is the latest available to me in my production environment.

I have tried a few different graphs, including some 11.0 visualizations, with the same result.

Thomas Wolf's profile image
Thomas Wolf posted Mon September 29, 2025 08:56 AM

Hi Martin,

We had this topic just recently. The new visualizations are rendered as SVG in HTML reports, but for PDF output they are converted to PNG. On the other hand, Charts are rendered as PNG in HTML reports - but for PDF output, they are converted to vector graphics. 

This just leaves me crying.

Anyway, if your target is PDF, you had better use the chart engine. It gives you more options for customization, too.

Thomas

Edit: Jeremy was faster. :)

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