size of pictures

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Smith
  • Start date Start date
J

John Smith

When I insert a 330 K JPEG picture to a word file, the size of the
word file increases by 540 K. When I insert a 1.5 Mb bmp file to
the word file, the size of the word file increases by only around
600 K. Why doesn't the size of the word file increase by the size
of the inserted file?
 
When you insert the picture, Word not only stores the picture but also
stores other information relating to its position, alignment, style, etc -
which results in a slightly higher overhead than just the picture.

In the case of inserting a bitmap picture: the reduction is because bitmap
format is one of the biggest over-sized formats you can use. Just create a
simple blank rectangle in bmp and see how big it is. When you insert the
bitmap, Word converts it to a metafile removing much of the massive wasted
lines of data in bitmaps. OTOH, jpeg is lossy compressed format leaving Word
unable to compress it.
 
John:

This is all a big guess, based on observed behavior of Word.

I suspect that Word can display BMP and WMF files using built-in software.
But it can't display any other formats. So for other formats it may have to
store a copy of the image in its native format (for later editing) PLUS a BMP
or WMF representation of that image for display purposes.

Bear
 
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