graphics

[obair81 at comcast.net]

This brings to mind a question: 

If one puts a tiff or bmp screen capture into visio (in order to take advantage of visio's excellent options for creating and managing arrows and callout text), and then saves it before putting it into frame, what Save As format would preserve the visio text callout clarity (which I am guessing is vector)?

This is so one can create an image that has callouts that never migrate or disappear once they go to html help, as frame callouts are wont to do, in my experience.  Also, visio's text/arrow options are far, far better than frame's.

Paul

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Fred Ridder" <docudoc at hotmail.com>
> Actually, you lose the font outlines as soon as the graphic is handled
> as a raster image. Raster images are nothing more nor less than
> complex patterns of dots; the notion of lines or curves or font
> outlines as entities has no meaning in the raster world.
> 
> When you're working with a vector drawing program, the font outline
> information is lost as soon you save the drawing in a raster image
> format like TIFF or GIF or PNG or BMP or JPEG. The only way to
> preserve the font outlines is to save the drawing in a vector image
> format like the application's native file format or a vector metafile
> format like EPS, PDF, SVG, WMF, or EMF if you need the image to
> be portable.
> 
> If you're talking about screen captures, the font outlines are lost
> at the very beginning of the process by the code that renders the
> screen display (whether that code is in the app or part of the OS).
> Monitors are raster devices and only know about patterns of dots.
> 
> One further disadvantage of JPEG for line art or screen shots that
> Joe didn't mention is the fact that its area-based compression
> algorithm invariably produces artifacts near abrupt color transitions
> (which pretty much defines text and most line art. Depending on
> the compression setting, you'll see some amount of gray "smudginess"
> surrounding the letters in a block of text and alongside lines in a
> drawing. When you read a newspaper, you can always tell which
> advertisers foolishly used a JPEG file to supply their logo or artwork.
> It's simply the wrong format for that job.
> 
> My opinions only; I don't speak for Intel.
> Fred Ridder
> Intel
> Parsippany, NJ