User talk:Hymyly/Archive/2007

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This is an archive of my talk page from the year 2007, and should not be modified. Please go to my real talk page to leave messages. If you want to reply to an old message here, please copy the entire conversation to the real talk page, or just refer to it if the original content is not too relevant. Please note that templates and such are "subst:"-ed when moved here, to preserve their original contents.

I'm using PDF to JPG. Suggestions on PDF to PNG or SVG?

I have contributed images that are generated from PDF and converted to JPG. For me, this is easy, and the JPGs are compact and easy to post. Sample images (click to enlarge):

You have added a "bad jpg" or "should be SVG" notice to some of these images. I appreciate the feedback and would enjoy improving the quality of my contributions.

Do you know of an easy way to convert PDFs to PNG and/or SVG?

The problem with JPEG is that it is designed for photographs. Among other things it throws away a lot of colour information, leaving all details to be described only by the brightness information. While this is good for photos, it introduces a lot of artefacts into non-photos, such as graphs. Additionally, JPEG is based on patented algorithms, which is always good to avoid. (See JPEG#Potential patent issues and a similar case at GIF#Unisys and LZW patent enforcement.)

Having said that, the best format to use for graphs is Scalable Vector Graphics, because it allows the graph to be scaled to whatever size fits in the article without getting aliasing problems. If the graph were saved in a raster format such as PNG, you would need a very high resolution image to achieve the same result. In most such cases, SVG yields smaller files.

The only way I know of converting PDF to SVG is through FreeSVG, but there may be others. If you have the source data the easiest way might be to generate the graphs from scratch. To edit the SVG files afterwards I strongly recommend Inkscape.

On a side note, if you have the ability to recreate the graphs from scratch, do not include the title and legend in the image itself, put these on the image desciption page instead. The graphs can then be moved to Commons and used on all Wikipedias. The title and legend are not readable when the image is scaled down anyway.

Cheers, Hymyly^T@C 16:14, 27 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm in the process of converting images to PNG. Thank you for your input on the subject.--Robapalooza 01:04, 15 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]