development wrote:

Could you please supply an example article where this goes "wrong" (please also indicate which images are affected).

grysmith wrote:

Sure, here goes

Try http://en.wikibooks.org/User:Graeme E. Smith/Testpage

You can see that it accepts the base document size with no problem

Reduces it to a smaller size, but refuses to expand it to a larger size

Of course I am exagerating this version to the point where it is blurry and all the mistakes in the original image are visible, but I think that it should be the Authors choice whether or not to expand an illustration or picture, and how much.

You might for instance want a blurry picture, to illustrate a point.

If you look at this file in Wikilanguage the third version nearly fills the screen, but in PDF it is almost exactly the same size as the original. The point I am trying to make is that for storage reasons pictures of a certain size are allowed at creative commons, but for display purposes you might want something a little larger, even if you have to sacrifice some quality to get it.

I hope this helps.

development wrote:

Ok, now I know what you are talking about.
In principle the PDF render uses the width/height information if present. The problem you are experiencing is that there is a minimum resolution at which images are rendered. Since the image in your example has a low resolution it does not get scaled up if you set the width to 800 pixels. If you use a higher resolution image you should get the expected result.

The minimum resolution is present, since I believe low resolution images should not be scaled up to much since this looks ugly in a PDF. Since the minimum resolution is a global setting for a wiki I would not really want to lower it.

Therefore I am closing this bug. If you think its a big issue please reopen.