Re: Figure formats

[Mari Voipio <mari.voipio@iki.fi>]

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.