Subject: Picture formats (Was: FTP and Mail)
From: [email-masked] (Simo Salanne)
Date: Sun, 28 Mar 93 16:58:06 GMT

In <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Lepez Philippe) writes:

>I would advocate for some sort of compression. I received scanned plan in 
>postscript. They where compressed and then UUencoded, the result was a mail of 
>about 1300 lines (90Kb). When they where expanded the size was about 1.5 Mb !

Hold on! If the image was scanned, postscript is not the format for it.
Postscript's power is in "vector images" not in raster images. For raster
pictures there are GIF, TIFF etc.. which must be uuencoded to get through
the news/mail. Compression doesn't help any more, because they are compressed
already. 

>I think that there are compressors working both on Unix and Pc, the uuencode 
>should be available for Pc also. 
Unix compress and uudencode are available (free) for DOS, too.

>In any case for me FTP is the best solution, but we should have something 
>available for the greatest majority. Doesn't that means that we should go for 
>some PC standard ?

There  are two distinct things:

1. the format of the image/drawing
2. compression/encoding to improve transfer through
   news/mail.

I suggest:

1. Postscrip for drawings, no compression, no encoding.
2. GIF for images, uuencoded, no compression.

Now, I just sit and wait for plans, images, paintings...
Smooth Winds

Simo Salanne

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