Web to Print/Graphics Question

[Godzilla Blitz]

I'm working on a Japanese Katakana Workbook that I hope to eventually publish, and I'm trying to incorporate a lot of authentic materials in the text. One of the things I'm trying to do is get some screenshots of some Japanese websites, and use them as the foundation of some exercises.

I can get the screenshots alright, but of course the low-res graphics used on websites look crappy when you print them out. I'm curious if anyone knows an easy way to take a low-res graphic and sharpen it to the point that it looks good when printing.

For background, I'm doing this on a Mac with most major design software packages installed (Illustrator, Freehand, etc.). I have a PC here in the office as well, but don't have an extensive collection of design software for it.

Any thoughts or guidance would be greatly appreciated, even if it's to point me to a forum or website that might be able to help.

Thanks!

[Kasey Chang]

You need to "smooth" them first and match the DPI for optimum results.

On the other hand, I thinki used to use MS Word and the screenshots actually came out okay, though its' best to trim and show only the sections that will illustrate your point rather than using the whole screen.

[Godzilla Blitz]

Kasey:

Thanks. I was thinking that I should be trying to turn them into vector graphics, but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to do that. I'll give Photoshop's smoothing features a try and see how that looks.

One of the difficulties with this is that Japanese characters are intricate. I've got to get some pretty fine resolution to make the Japanese look good.

I have been just capturing small portions of pages, but thank you for the heads up.