Jörg Hagmann wrote:
If you have the choice of format when preparing the figures for a book written with ConTeXt, what would you opt for? (The figures are being drawn with ChemDraw and Illustrator).
I'm not terribly good at this (yet?), but one my main guidelines in this kind of situations in and out of ConTeXt is to keep vector graphics in vector format and only use bitmap graphics (like png or jpg) if the original is in a bitmap format (like a photo). I handle mostly graphics that originate from a 3D CAD program and different types of graphics I draw myself in CorelDraw (equivalent to Adobe Illustrator as far as I know). These both generally produce vector drawings The drawings from the 3D program are mostly in pdf format when they arrive to me and I've found, somewhat to my surprise, that the best way of handling them seems to be to include them as pdf, just to crop them to the picture itself. I also turn my CorelDraw pics into pdf before adding them to ConTeXt based text, that inserts them nicely and makes it easy for me to share any graphics at request (I'm occasionally asked to send just graphic 3.1 from manual x, so it is a good thing to have all of them as pdf). The nice thing with vector graphics is that they are almost indefinitely scalable, so the size of the original is not so critical - and the files don't take much space even when the original is bigger than the graphic in my book. Whenever I have to do something with bitmaps, I try to scale them close to the final size with good graphics programs, I feel that this give me better control over what happens to the graphics when resized (the resolution of some of the originals is pretty bad...). On the other hand, if it doesn't look bad in the final product, why bother... Greetings from Finland, Mari PS. Here's a manual [all public] I've done by using text in ConTeXt and vector graphics in pdf and bitmaps in jpg/png: http://www.kpatents.com/1Library/manuals_pr-23.htm. For example chapter 5 (at http://www.kpatents.com/1Library/manuals/pr-23/pr-23_05.pdf) has mainly screen capture bitmaps (I used png format) and chapter 4 (at http://www.kpatents.com/1Library/manuals/pr-23/pr-23_04.pdf includes a ton of drawings originating from our 3D CAD.