q: Blurry text ( was buried in "text clerity" thread

I'm starting to do a lot of pictures under/around text, ( like greeting cards ). The people I send it to often say the image is OK, yet the text seems blurry. I zoom into a zillion percent, and my text is razor sharp. I ask them "I the whole thing blurry", and they say "no. just the text part".

I export to jpeg, 300dpi, 100% quality, ( this is page canvas size 5x7 or often i double it to 10x14inches ) typical file size of 3-4 megs. I have the default anitaliasing checked off ( I think it's the lower one, whichever the default is, the one the help file says if you dont know, "choose this one", as I dont have any specific object placment on the canvas)

Why are the people saying this? Should I be using gif not jpeg? or png?

The jpeg file is usually being developed at a local or online photo place like snapfish or winkflash.com I dont know if they will take PNG, and won't gif degrade the colors or quality vs. jpeg??

Thanks

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Originally Posted by Tallis

Why are the people saying this? Should I be using gif not jpeg? or png?

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Your question has to do with text. As I think someone mentioned in the other thread, jpeg is a lossy file format. That means that it tries to figure out what pixels it can lose to make the file smaller. It's good for photos with lots of colors. It's not good for straight lines, sharp details or large areas of one color. That's why text gets fuzzy and artifacts appear. Gif and png don't have these problems.

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The jpeg file is usually being developed at a local or online photo place like snapfish or winkflash.com I dont know if they will take PNG, and won't gif degrade the colors or quality vs. jpeg??

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I just looked at snapfish and winkflash. Snapfish takes only jpeg or bmp. (Bmps won't have the jpeg fuzz, but the files will be huge.) However, winkflash takes tiffs and pngs (as well as jpg, bmp and gif).

You're correct that gif is not good for photos. However, tiff and png should be just fine. Tiff is a standard format for high quality output, and png is a lossless format that does very well in a variety of situations. Both should give you good, sharp text and lovely photos if you provide the file in the appropriate resolution for the photo size you want. You may have to experiment a little to see what works best for you.

Thank you for the comments. This a new issue I've come accross.

Yes, my question definately has to do with text. I'm told the image portions are just fine, it's always the text that's "blurry"... not horribly blurry, but noticably less sharp than the accompanying photo sections.

It's strange that a mass-market photo site would not accept gif or png. I'm glad that some at least do.

If few accept png, I wonder what is the bext tradeoff. GIF to improve text and perhaps degrade the photo area, or JPEG to maintain the status quo...

If it's only the text, it may have to do with your text not being aligned properly on the canvas (and its size in pt is not optimal).
This has been covered in the Xara Outsider of July:
http://www.xara.com/news/july06/tutorial.asp

See if that helps you :)

Mahvelous. Im reading now. Maybe this could be it.... This part is very interesting:

"Perhaps the only confusing thing is that in order to align these fonts exactly to pixels you must set the XY coordinates of the text to end in .8 of a pixel. So an XY value of say 120.8, 50.8pix would in fact align the font to be exactly on the grid. (This is the because the origin point has a slight 0.2 pixel offset from the actual correct corner.) "

Wait a minute now, if you have "snap to grid" selected, will moving a line of text with the mouse then snap that to grid?- and if so- will it snap it blurry as per above to a multiple of the grid starting from origin zero, or will it "smart-snap" it to a .8 offset as per above to avoid the blurriness??

No, the text - and any other shape - will have one of its edges snapped. Maybe it's possible to set the grid in such a manner that it would work, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone else here knows how to do that :)

If you want to move your text, you can use the arrow keys, in combination with Shift and CTRL (not ALT!). The .8 positions should be retained using this method.

The default origin point of the grid is 0pix,0pix. You can change this value to anything you want, so you could, for example, set it to 0.8pix,0.8pix. The rest of the grid divisions should space equally from the origin. This would allow you to align your text to the grid and keep it spaced the way that you want.

The option for changing the Grid origin is under File->Page Options. In the dialog that opens, choose the tab titled "Grid and Ruler"