About .jpg

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
October 2, 2003

Dear SW List, Nana, Sandy, Daniel...
You are right that GIFs are better for SignWriting diagrams...But maybe
Nana doesn't own a graphics program that can create a GIF? They are not
as common as you would think, actually...

So what are the programs on Windows that can create the GIF format?
Photoshop (which costs a lot of money)....Perhaps CorelDraw? That costs
money too...any free programs that you know of?

Val ;-)

----------------------------------


On Thursday, October 2, 2003, at 07:10 AM, Sandy Fleming wrote:

> Hi Daniel, and everybody!
>
> I notice Nana ignored my advice and did save it as .jpg, though  :)
>
> To illustrate the point, if you open Nana's .jpg in a graphics editor
> and
> zoom in closely, you'll see a lot of grey pixels around the black
> lines.
> This is due to having edited and saved it as a .jpg.
>
> It may not look too bad now, but if people edited it a lot, it would
> get
> gradally worse.
>
> So use .gif for SignWriting!  :)
>
> Sandy
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: SignWriting List [mailto:SW-L at ADMIN.HUMBERC.ON.CA]On Behalf Of
>> Daniel Noelpp
>> Sent: 02 October 2003 14:11
>> To: SW-L at ADMIN.HUMBERC.ON.CA
>> Subject: About .jpg
>>
>>
>> Hello Sandy
>>
>> About the .jpg format you did an excellent job explaining it,
>> but I need to explain why .jpg "ignores" some information.
>>
>> Sandy wrote:
>>
>>> If you do use .jpg, you'll find that smudging creeps into the
>> image if you
>>> edit it, because the .jpg format works by ignoring some of the
>> information
>>> in the image - it loses a little information every time you
>> change it. The
>>> ..gif format keeps all information, so your SignWriting will remain
>>> crystal clear no matter how many times you edit the image!
>>
>> When storing a .jpg the colors in the picture are transformed
>> in a spectrum. This is a mathematical representation to make
>> compression easier. Now the funny part is that not the whole
>> spectrum is saved. You even can tell Photoshop or many
>> other software how much of the spectrum you want to save
>> (as a slider or as a percent value). The better quality you have,
>> the larger the file will be.
>>
>> This is a very clever trick because the smudging is almost
>> inperceptible for photographic pictures. DVDs use a very
>> similar trick to encode movies.
>>
>> So I hope you don't object to this small lesson even if the
>> subject doesn't relate to SignWriting directly. Sandy is right:
>> Don't use .jpg to save SignWriting texts!
>>
>> Cheers!
>> Daniel
>>
>