Why are images always fuzzy?

[rcrowell]

I have tried inserting jpeg and eps and both come up fuzzy or bitmapped, the vector images look poor and forget any text that might be in the graphic. I can't print my invoices with fuzzy logos, it looks very unprofesional. Any ideas?

Thanks,

Ryan

[BobWeaver]

Jpeg's will look fuzzy because they are a compressed format designed for photographic images. The compression technique is optimized for photos which tend not to have abrupt contrast changes like you find in line art etc. So, they tend to lose sharpness. They are also a bitmapped format. So they won't scale well.

Eps's will look fuzzy because you are only seeing a low rez bitmapped preview image in the pasted image. The full resolution eps will only be available when printing. However, OSX (if you happen to be on that platform) may have some capability for displaying the full resolution of eps images.

There are a lot of different graphic file formats because each one has its own advantages and disadvantages. If you want to display computer generated graphics, you should be saving the image in a vector based file format that can be scaled and displayed without resolution loss. On a Mac, the PICT format is good. I'm not sure what the equivalent format on Windows would be.