Carlos wrote regarding 'Re: [SLE] graphic file format, which?' on Mon, Aug 30 at 09:45:
The Sunday 2004-08-29 at 17:38 -0400, Doug McGarrett wrote:
Which graphic file format is most likely to be readable on any modern operating system--.tif, .jpg, .bmp, what? (I don't want to save and email a raw file.) If .tif, then what flavor?
jpeg, to use in email. It looses some information, but you can adjust how much (and see the result) with gimp. If size is not important, but quality is, send as png.
More precisely, for photographs or other imagery that has a wide range of colors following relatively smooth transisitons, jpeg's default compression scheme works very well. If you have sharp color transitions - like line art or something with text in it - or if you have an image that uses few color, you will get better results with a bitmapped format. I think that png is very good for that use, as long as you have a good png program. If you need to keep quality over size, png is always a better choice. It's worth noting that most of the Adobe programs, etc, do a horrible job of supporting png compression. If you grab something like pngcrush, etc, and run it on the png images your scanning program generates, you'll probably save some space. Alternativey, the Gimp supports png compression well, so it might be worthwhile to get the win32 version of the Gimp and either use it to TWAIN accuire scans, or scan to tiff and convert to png with Gimp. --Danny