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Subject:Re: Suggestions for new tool option From:Christine -dot- Anameier -at- seagate -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Mon, 4 Jun 2001 15:49:42 -0500
Andrew Plato wrote: <<One of the main reasons GIFs are troublesome is
because they are limited to 256 colors. JPGs are bad because they artifact
and look like crapola. ("artifact" are those little nasty color crunchies
that form around color gradients in
JPGs.)>>
I agree on JPGs. GIFs have worked fine for me, though; I usually need under
100 colors for screen captures, and that's including however many shades of
grey are showing up in the drop shadow. My GIFs (screen captures, all
cropped to some degree) are running about 5-7KB on average.
As Bill Swallow noted, if you print to a postscript file and then distill
the results using carefully chosen Distiller settings, the graphics don't
get messed up.
As an experiment I tried opening the same GIFs in Photoshop, copying them,
and pasting them into a Word doc. The resulting doc was roughly three times
the size of the Word doc where I inserted the GIFs, and the other problem
is, when I pasted them into Word, they were much larger on the page.
Resizing them within Word garbled them in PDF. (Interestingly, if I insert
a GIF in Word and resize it, it still looks acceptable in PDF. But pasted
images get distorted if you resize them, which you'd have to do; they're
huge.)
So I stand by my GIFs. I agree with Andrew, though, that optimizing the
image is crucial. I've often run across docs where somebody pasted or
inserted a bunch of 24-bit bitmaps of entire screenshots. Those add up to a
10-MB Word doc fast... it pays to learn something about graphics formats
and their impact on file size.
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