RE: i can't win...

> Back to the .GIF side - has anyone considered that 2- or 3-bit
> greyscale
> in a .GIF is probably *more* readable than straight monochrome due to
> the anti-aliasing that a greyscale image would provide?
>
The only problem with that is that greyscale GIFs don't print
particularly well unless you have a good laser printer. I did a bunch
of about 100dpi greyscale scans which made for a nice quality on screen
and looked great printed on the beastly HP 5Si (600dpi plus RET) here at
work, but they were horrid printed at 300DPI on my Panasonic at home. I
think high-rez B/W is pretty good for "standard" since you can always
use something like Photoshop and re-sample it down to more greyscales if
you want, and if you don't want to you can still print 1:1 on a 600dpi
printer and it looks really nice...

> The only missing statistic from the the comparative study, IMHO, is
> .ZIP.
> If all you're after is lossless compression large image files, .ZIP
> may
> well provide results comparable to Zonn's format.
>
Yeah, I dunno on that one. LHA, ARJ, and the like might do better or
worse I suppose...

> One caveat - if Zonn's format contains optimizations for long vertical
> lines as well as long horizontal lines, it may well outperform .GIF
> and
> .ZIP when applied to schematic drawings.
>
Someone should write a .BMZ plugin for Netscape and IExplorer. ;-)

> (This may only hold true for cases where the scan was performed with
> the
> schematic being very well lined-up with the scanner during the
> scanning
> process. For fun, take a .GIF of a schematic and rotate it by 2-3
> degrees, and watch the size grow...)
>
Ahhhh, good point, but at sufficiently high resolution even an uneven
scan will probably have vertical or horizontal lines that are made up of
multiple-pixel widths.

Of course this is kind-of amusing to me since I think the last IDE drive
I got for my PC has like 64K sectors or something anyway. 652 bytes
worth of schematic? 64K of file system... ;-)

-Clay
Received on Fri May 15 12:18:37 1998