Most widely available lossless format for documents?

Which lossless graphics file format is most likely to be readable by
the majority of computers users?


WHAT HAPPENED THIS TIME

I recently had to email a scan of a 'typed' letter to someone. I
figured that GIF was a good choice because I figured it is almost
universally readable and it was lossless. However the recipient said
they could not open it!

(I don't know what software they were running. The recipient worked
as a local government employee and they did not know what software
they had got either.)


PREPARING FOR NEXT TIME

I want to be able to send graphics to minimize the chance that users
saying can't open my file. I can scan to pretty much any graphics
file format, so all I need to do is make an informed choice. Ha!

Very surprisingly, I found that (lossy) JPEG at 200 dpi gave me a
graphics file that was not too huge and was much more readable than I
had expected. For the sake of commonality and universality and
readablility, I re-sent my graphics using JPEG. But somehow JPEG
doesn't really feel right for typed documents.

Somewhere on the web I read that PNG was almost universally readable.
Is this really so? Would it be a good choice for all emailed scans?

Can someone please advise.
Thank you.

"Zarbol Tsar" <zarbol@tsar.net> wrote in message
news:95EBA91E14DB351D7E@130.133.1.4...
> Which lossless graphics file format is most likely to be readable by
> the majority of computers users?

> (I don't know what software they were running. The recipient worked
> as a local government employee and they did not know what software
> they had got either.)
>
>
> PREPARING FOR NEXT TIME

You can prepare all you want, but if you have incompetents receiving the
images, then you are at the mercy of their ignorance.

> Somewhere on the web I read that PNG was almost universally readable.
> Is this really so? Would it be a good choice for all emailed scans?

PNG is a disaster for Micro$oft product users. Even PowerPoint can create it
and not display it properly for it's own sake!

TIFF comes to mind. Viewers are generally standard equipment.

Have him open the GIF file in his web browser, they can all display
this file type. If he says it will not, then something is wrong with
the way the computer is set up (either that or he has images disabled
in his browser, and that is either company policy or his own fault).

toby wrote:
> TIFF comes to mind. Viewers are generally standard equipment.
>
That would be wrong. JPEG is far more common.

--
john mcwilliams

I know that you believe you understood what you think I said, but I'm
not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

Zarbol Tsar wrote:
> Which lossless graphics file format is most likely to be readable by
> the majority of computers users?
>

PDF. There is a lossless and lossy way for PDF to encode images. Make
sure it is doing it lossless. Other than that, GIF is your best bet.
Either you made a bad GIF or the person viewing it was an idiot.

What program did you make the GIF with? Could Internet Explorer open
it? If so, then they were probably just too stupid to see anything you
send them.

Jon

[ Crossposting trimmed ]
["Followup-To:" header set to comp.periphs.scanners.]
On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 12:40:54 -0800, John McWilliams staggered into the
Black Sun and said:
> toby wrote:
>> TIFF comes to mind. Viewers are generally standard equipment.
> That would be wrong. JPEG is far more common.

? 'Doze9x, 2K, and XP include "Kodak Imaging", which can display G4,
uncompressed, and LZW TIFFs. OS X includes a TIFF viewer. Unix-like
OSes have ImageMagick, xv, Kuickshow, and Eye Of GNOME, which can all
handle all common image formats including TIFF in all normally-used
compression formats.

If you meant "JPEG images are more common on the WWW", that's true--but
that's because the average Web browser doesn't display TIFF for
historical raisins. In general, you need to remember that JPEG is lossy
and therefore not suitable for some of the things that people need to do
with their images. JPEG works for viewing over the Net because lossy
compression means smaller file sizes, which the poor bastards stuck on
dialup like.

--
Matt G|There is no Darkness in eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
Hire me! http://crow202.dyndns.org/~mhgraham/resume/
The early bird who catches the worm works for someone who comes in late
and owns the worm farm. --Travis McGee

> Zarbol Tsar <zarbol@tsar.net> wrote:

> Which lossless graphics file format is most likely to
> be readable by the majority of computers users?

PDF using only LZW compression. Of course, many real-world
contone images compress poorly, or not at all, with LZW,
in which case you'll need to consider the JPG tradeoffs.

If the source image happens to be vector (e.g. .AI, .DWG, .DXF,
..EPS, .SVG), a carefully considered workflow can preserve
the vector data structures in the resulting PDF.

--
Regards, Bob Niland mailto:name@ispname.tld
http://www.access-one.com/rjn email4rjn AT yahoo DOT com
NOT speaking for any employer, client or Internet Service Provider.

>Which lossless graphics file format is most likely to be readable
>by the majority of computers users?

8 bit tiff with no compression would get my vote, if you insist on
"lossless". If you can accept a lossy format, then jpegs.

>> TIFF comes to mind. Viewers are generally standard equipment

> John McWilliams wrote ...
>
> That would be wrong. JPEG is far more common
He did specify "lossless", which eliminates vanilla jpegs.