Single Page PDF Looks Low Resolution

Generally PDFs on tablets need to find the sweet spot depending on the device you are targeting.

You need to find the middle ground between the size of the PDF and the crispness of the images on the device you are targeting. This usually means that all of the images inside of your PDF need to be rendered anywhere between 132 DPI and 264 DPI. This is not quite print ready, which approaches 300 DPI.

We typically use a product called PDF Enhancer in house to optimize PDFs as they come in from clients. This helps us remain consistent from one app to the next.

There are a couple of other important things to keep in mind about the pdf tag. By default, the first page of any PDF (the cover) is rendered without tille based rasterization. The reason that is the default behavior is to improve the speed of rendering the first page. It also enhances the types of transitions that you can create when displaying the PDF. For example you might want to curldown the first page to give a nice paper effect. Rendering without tiles does a one pass rasterization, so there is a tradeoff in zoom quality. Usually downsampling the first page to 132 DPI will make the first page look crisp in the default mode.

You can override the non-tile behavior of the first page by adding covertile="yes" to the PDF tag. That will make the first page perform the same way all all subsequent pages.