
The workflow I would therefore suggest to you is the following one Recent versions of Inkscape can open a wide variety of formats, including PDFs. This is a drawing program which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and which is very powerful -perhaps too powerful for many much simpler designs. The idea is to open the PDF as if it was a drawing, using some vector graphic program, of which I recommend and detail Inkscape.

I have rediscovered a third method that was probably invented by one of my PhD students. This normally improves the quality of the resulting image, but it is still limited by the resolution of your screen! You would typically open the document in Acrobat, zooming in until the region you are interested in fills the screen, and then use the "screenshot" or "camera" icon to capture that region.

The two alternatives I normally found were My work as a scientist and also as an occasional outreach communicator has put me in a situation where I need to extract graphical material from publications and other documents.
