Graphics can do a great deal to enhance your documents. Sometimes they are a nice way to escape from three columns of mundane text in a 3-panel brochure. Other times, they can be the focus of your document. Regardless, the quality of your graphics is very important.

The term graphics can easily be segmented into two smaller categories; photos and logos (clipart). As a generalization, photos are considered any bitmapped graphic (i.e., it has been downloaded from the web, scanned, or taken with a digital camera), and logos are vector graphics that have been designed in a vector graphics program or taken off of a clipart CD (Microsoft Word, CorelDraw, etc.).

Photos are an easy concept to understand, and I am sure that you are already fairly familiar with them. Photos are nothing more than a snapshot of something. That is, each dot in the picture is represented by a color. There are various types of photo formats. With web pages, for example, web designers typically use either JPEG or GIF images. This is because these file types use methods of compression which yield a smaller sized file, which in turn is faster to download. For printing, however, it is better to use a format with more clarity. That is why the TIFF (Tagged-Image File Format) is considered the standard for photos used in documents to be printed.

Logos and Clipart is a different concept. Instead of taking a snapshot of something, these files are nothing more than a series of equations used to abbreviate a graphic (for those of you who were captivated by your college calculus class, wherever you are, this might be interesting). With a photo, if you wanted a red line on a black canvas, your file would have specific information for every point in the image. This, of course, would yield a very large file size with respect to its simplicity. With a logo, or vector graphic, the file would only state the canvas size, the line length (with the two endpoints), and the color of both. When all is said and done, you get a file that is exponentially smaller than it would have been if it were an image. The best thing about vector graphics is that they can be scaled to a larger or smaller size without losing quality.

Of course this means that vector graphics are only suited for some types of graphics. You would definitely not want to attempt to draw an Arizona sunset with vectors…it would be a mess, if not impossible.

There are a few different file formats for vector graphics, EPS, AI, FH#, and CDR. And, just like everything else, some are better than others. The EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) is considered the standard vector format. It can easily be opened and placed in every common program. AI is the file format used with Adobe Illustrator. The other two file types, FH# and CDR, are files that were created with Freehand and CorelDraw respectively. These files can only be used in the programs that they were created in, and can not be placed in a design program like Quark XPress or PageMaker. That is why these formats must be saved in EPS format before using them with your document.