Subject: big honkin' images (was Re: XP design for image support)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri Apr 20 2001 - 13:10:53 CDT
At 10:42 AM 4/20/01 -0700, WJCarpenter wrote:
>sam> Wow, those are big space savings - but that's an image that
>sam> people aren't going to want to embed in AbiWord. It's just too
>sam> big. It won't fit nicely one paper, and it just won't look good
>sam> enough printed.
>
>Well, this is a false assumption in my experience. In business life,
>I've often received 2 MB MSWord documents that reduced to 20-30k once
>I deleted a thumbnail-sized graphic that had been shrunk from some
>high quality image somewhere. Just for example, look at the AT&T
>corporate logo. Pretty simple stuff, all one color, etc. One popular
>way to get that into documents was to use a high-quality EPS image
>(good enough to make a smooth image a full page size) and use MSWord's
>re-scaling stuff to shink it to a piece of the letterhead.
>
>Just yesterday, a business colleague sent me a 4 MB RTF file that
>contained only a screen shot of a dialog box. I guess they did it
>that way because that was the shape of nail their hammer fit.
>
>The moral is that users don't always do smart stuff. Anybody who
>communicates regularly with MSOffice users probably knows this in
>spades.
Agreed. That's *exactly* how people behave. :-) In both cases, they
didn't scale the images down to the minimum needed for their purposes. What
does this mean?
Some possibilities:
1. They didn't know how much it'd bloat their documents.
2. They didn't care.
3. They care, but don't know how to do better.
Indeed, unless they know the DPI of all printers that they'll ever use, or
are knowledgeable enough to make an intelligent guess, what they did is a
safe choice. It's a lot easier to scale down too much information, than it
is to scale up too little.
I suppose it might be an interesting project to think about the kinds of UI
interactions needed to help people (in a non-paper-clip way) choose an
appropriately-scaled image to use. I'm not sure what that'd be, but I don't
think we can silently do so for them.
Failing that, I'm not sure what we can do to keep people from bloating their
documents in this way. At some point, you *want* to make people see the
consequences of their choices. If they want a huge file, let them have a
huge file, no?
Paul
PS: This is a discussion about image scaling, and not JPEGs, right?
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