Most widely available lossless format for documents?

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Zarbol Tsar

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 said:
Which lossless graphics file format is most likely to be readable by
the majority of computers users?
Click to expand...
(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
Click to expand...

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?
Click to expand...

PNG is a disaster for Micro$oft product users. Even PowerPoint can create it
and not display it properly for it's own sake!
 
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).
 
Zarbol said:
Which lossless graphics file format is most likely to be readable by
the majority of computers users?
Click to expand...

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.]
That would be wrong. JPEG is far more common.
Click to expand...

? '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.
 
Zarbol Tsar said:
Which lossless graphics file format is most likely to
be readable by the majority of computers users?
Click to expand...

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

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
Click to expand...
He did specify "lossless", which eliminates vanilla jpegs.
 
Bill Hilton said:
He did specify "lossless", which eliminates vanilla jpegs.
Click to expand...

Which to my mind also rules out GIF for color documents,
since it's 8-bit. Might be OK for B&W and grayscale,
but crushing the color depth is easily as damaging as
imposing a curve-matching compression like JPG.

GIF also has no notion of "dpi", although the general
convention is that it's a very coarse 72 dpi. If you
want to share even at FAX res (200 dpi), by default
the document page will seem to be way too big.

GIF, JPG and TIF are also (usually) single-page file
formats.

I once got sent a single file that was a multi-page TIFF
(from a company that at the time was refusing to
acknowledge the existence of PDF). Took a while to
figure out how to see pages other than 1.
 
Zarbol Tsar said:
Which lossless graphics file format is most likely to be readable by
the majority of computers users?
[...]
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?
Click to expand...

No. Especially on older setups, PNG won't work. I read the other
responses (PDF, TIFF... etc) but still, GIF is the best choice, with
one caveat: Avoid all bit depths other than 256 for maximum
compatibility (and no transparency or multiple images of course). Even
some recent software has major problems with 2 bps GIFs (Acrobat being
one of them, I believe). Other than that, any (non-ideologically
oriented) program that can read PNGs will read GIFs. PDF is too recent
and needs a plugin (and anybody who installed acroread will likely
have a recent browser capable of reading GIFs), TIFF may or may not be
well supported (there just are too many variations and it's a complex
format). JPEG (vanilla, not 2000) is actually the best choice if you
ask me, even better than GIF, if not text quality but compatibility is
the most imprortant criteria.
 
GIF also has no notion of "dpi", although the general
convention is that it's a very coarse 72 dpi.
Click to expand...

Neither do I. What is dpi? What does a coarse dpi look like, and why should
I care?
 
GIF also has no notion of "dpi", although the general
Neither do I. What is dpi?
Click to expand...

Dots Per Inch. Fax on "quality" setting is usually
200 dpi. Inkjet and laser printers nowadays start
at 300 dpi, although 600 dpi for black is considered
the minimum. "Publication quality" is 2400 dpi or so.

72 dpi is the very low-end of monitor resolution
these days. But monitors can do 24 bits of depth per
pixel. GIF can't.
What does a coarse dpi look like, and why should I care?
Click to expand...

Most raster graphics file formats, in addition to being
an array of X by Y pixel data values, encode what
real-world dimensions the span of X and Y are intended
to represent.

GIF does not, and the default assumption is 72 dpi.
Unless the receiving/rendering app is smart enough to
ask the user (and rescale), any GIF raster bigger than
about 576 x 756 won't print properly on US letter size
(allowing for some unprintable margin area).

So if you scan the 8x10.5 region of a letter-size
document at 300 dpi, you'll get a 2400 x 3150 raster.
If you save it as GIF, a "dumb" (and maybe not so
dumb) receiving app may think it's supposed to print
that at 33.33 x 43.75 inches.

I just ran this experiment in Photoshop 7.0. Created
a 300 dpi 8x10.5 image. Saved it as .GIF. When it
re-opened, Photoshop thought it was a 33x44 inch image,
and would have attempted to print it at that size.

Unless 72 dpi is ideal for the subject matter, using
..GIF will cause extra work for recipients of the files,
when they attempt to print them.
 
Bill said:
He did specify "lossless", which eliminates vanilla jpegs.
Click to expand...
It surely does; overlooked the word "lossless" in the Subject and
responded only to what's most generally viewable, thinking a JPG would
almost certainly be an improvement over a GIF, and if converted to TIFF
would be too big to send.
 
Which to my mind also rules out GIF for color documents,
since it's 8-bit.
Click to expand...

Of course, if the original has less than 257 unique colours then GIF would
suffice.

However, text should be saved as text - an OCR program can translate an
image-of-text into text.

Andrew
 
As a 20 year manager I will say this: The sender is the problem. By
his own admission, he sent something the person on the other end could
not open. The sender must realize that the recipient may be
"professionally handicapped" - but not necessarily "stupid". As you
explain, the image should have been "tested in the browser" by the
sender. Before sending them to their final destination, I frequently
email the messages to my self to test their viability - by viewing
them with IE (the ultimate hurdle - it which normally lies supposedly
dormant but ever eager to rear its ugly head) instead of my glorious
Firefox browser..
 
[Please, if you do have to crosspost, next time at least be so kind as
to set a single-group followup-to. Repaired.]

In comp.graphics.algorithms Zarbol Tsar said:
Which lossless graphics file format is most likely to be readable by
the majority of computers users?
Click to expand...

Your initial choice of GIF (if and as far as it *is* lossless, for the
given image) was quite certainly the right answer to that already. In
a nutshell, no program that is capable of displaying images at all,
and is younger than, roughly, the original Mosaic browser, could
seriously refuse working with GIF files.
However the recipient said they could not open it!
Click to expand...

If so, then odds are that no other choice of file format would have
worked any better.

The recipient rather clearly either doesn't know how to extract and
view non-text attachments found in emails at all, regardless of what
format they come in, or he's under some external restriction
preventing him from doing so (e.g. a completely brain-dead email
client being forced on him, or a system security measure blocking all
attachments summarily).
 
Dots Per Inch. Fax on "quality" setting is usually
200 dpi. Inkjet and laser printers nowadays start
at 300 dpi, although 600 dpi for black is considered
the minimum. "Publication quality" is 2400 dpi or so.

72 dpi is the very low-end of monitor resolution
these days. But monitors can do 24 bits of depth per
pixel. GIF can't.
Click to expand...

-- snip --

Bob, I am the OP and am interested in looking closer at TIFF.

When I go to create a TIFF using ACDSee 3.1 I get the following
options *before* the TWAIN menu appears. Presumably these parameters
are pass to the TWAIN software?

Compression:
CCITT Group 3
CCITT Group 3
LZW
Deflate
JPEG

Resolution
horizontal - default is 96 dpi
vertical - default is 96 dpi

What should I select from the above to get:
(a) the most compact resultant TIFF file?
(b) the most common compression in order that most users can read the
TIFF file?

Are the horizontal/vertical resolution options above going to 're-
resolve' whatever I select in the TWAIN menu? For example, the TWAIN
software defaults to 300 dpi so will TWAIN create a file with a
resoultion of 300 dpi and then ACDSee recreate this file as a TIFF
with, say, 96 dpi? Seems a recipe for poor quality!

Any info welcome.
 
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