Re: Which image format

[cchris -at- toptechwriter -dot- us]

> a printed manual, so he wants them all to be in png or vector art
> format.  The vector art format is not a problem since there is very
> little vector art in my manuals, but I have hundreds of GIFS.  I
> understand that PNG is better, but does it make that much of a
> difference in a professionally printed manual.
> 
> Thanks,
>  
> Wade

Hi, Wade

Just a few more thoughts on your problem. Your boss has a valid point in
that creating the "screen captures" as vector graphics would look better.
It's just that you'd have to create the artwork from scratch in FreeHand
or Illustrator.

If your captures are mostly text with simple color graphics, you can
create vector facsimiles quickly, but I wouldn't want to have to do more
than a dozen or so since updating the artwork in future revisions will be
a pain. A benefit from redoing the captures as vector line-art is that
they can be resized with no loss of clarity and no increase in file size.

If the captures contain photos and the like, you're better off getting the
original images from the people who designed the system you're
documenting. They probably started with high resolution images that were
converted to low res for use on the web. Then you can create the capture
as 300-dpi Photoshop files using the original  screen captures as
templates. If you go this route, make  sure you turn off anti-aliasing for
the text.
 
Chris Christner
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