Dear list members, 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). JPEG, TIFF, eps etc, or doesn't it matter? Should the figures be drawn at exactly the final size, or is resizing when setting ok? Other suggestions? Thank you for the help, Jörg. PD Dr.med. Jörg Hagmann-Zanolari Institute of Biochemistry and Genetics DKBW, University of Basel Mattenstrasse 28 CH-4058 Basel Switzerland Phone +41 (0)61 6953049
Jörg Hagmann wrote:
Dear list members, 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).
vector graphics : pdf (or eps converted to pdf) b&w bitmaps : png color birmaps : jpg medium/high
JPEG, TIFF, eps etc, or doesn't it matter? Should the figures be drawn at exactly the final size, or is resizing when setting ok? Other suggestions?
as long as you have >=600dpi scaling is seldom a problem Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------
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.
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).
An interesting thing is that sometimes some programs make stupid mistakes when exporting to PDF. For example, I have had some bounding box problems when exporting to PDF. The bounding box tends to be the size of a page, which is really not a nice thing. (This happens with CorelDraw 11 in OS X and with older CDR versions in other OSes.) Illustrator should be safe, as PDF is one of its "home" formats. A workaround which I've been using for years is to export in EPS. All graphics programs I've come across have been able to do that reliably. Then the EPS can be converted into a PDF by using one of the following: a) Adobe Distiller b) Ghostscript (epstopdf, eps2pdf, or equivalent) c) Preview in OS X. I have found it very useful to have all illustrations in PDF format in the right size (i.e., clipped to the right size, correct bounding box). Then it is easy to play around with them. Even though vector graphics is -- in theory -- infinitely scalable, in practice it is much better to try and draw the pictures 1:1. If the images are scaled, line widths and annotations are scaled, too. Especially when there are several similar pictures with different scale factor, the result looks odd. So, the final size of the illustration should be known before drawing the actual picture! It is also a good idea to scale the bitmaps down (or up) to the final size and resolution before inserting them. This avoids a number of strange problems when rendering the images. For photographs, 200 dpi should be enough almost always, line art requires 300 dpi. (And a very important exception is that all screen captures should be taken "as is" without any operations on them.) Too large a resolution makes the files unnecessarily large and slow, so even that should be gotten rid of. Graphics packages have different resizeing algorithms, and getting to know all of them takes some experimenting, but it is well worth the trouble. What comes to the figure formats, PNG is good for lossless images (screen captures) or images requiring alpha channel. JPG is best for photographs and other continuous-tone real-world images (and some visualizations). But, whenever possible, use PDF, if there is any choice. - Ville
participants (4)
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Hans Hagen -
Jörg Hagmann -
Mari Voipio -
Ville Voipio