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Jan Henning wrote:
> Screenshots are bitmap images. Bitmap images are for
> practical purposes, impossible to resize without losing quality.
I would agree that screenshots are generally impossible to resize
without losing quality. This is not necessarily true for all bitmap
images, if by bitmap we mean "raster" (as opposed to vector) and not
just the BMP format. I've seen things like photographs resized with
decent results. As far as I can tell, the problem with screenshots is
that they're full of text--and visually speaking, text consists of
intricate sharp edges that inevitably get blurry when you resize them as
a raster image. Readability depends on the edges staying sharp.
Incidentally, this is the same reason you do NOT want to save a
screenshot as a JPG. JPG makes sharp edges blurry if you use enough
compression to make the JPG format worthwhile. (You could set it to
"maximum quality," but why bother? Just use a GIF, which is smaller and
typically lossless for this kind of image.) JPG is great for photos,
awful for screenshots with text.
When I use screenshots in any format, I bend over backwards to avoid
resizing them. Most of the time I crop them to just show a small part of
the screen, or occasionally I'll doctor up the screen captures to cut
out blank space (in captures of dialog boxes or small windows, for
example).
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