The Perfect Page

Computer Graphics

Before the days of electronic publication, graphics for print were made by clipping art from an actual, hold-in-your-hand book of "clip art," pasting it on your actual, hard-copy page, and making photocopies of the whole thing. Or artists could draw a picture and take a photograph of it. Today, we skip all these steps and make graphics directly on our computers, graphics that we can simply e-paste into an electronic document.

Be forewarned: this topic will be a little involved. Some terms might not be familiar to you and some might not be fully explained here. But if, by the end of this section, you understand the basic differences between different graphic file formats and know how to choose a file format for your specific need, that will be just fine.

First, you will learn about the two basic categories of graphics: raster and vector images. Then you will learn about different graphic file formats within these two categories—their strengths and weaknesses and what purposes they are best suited to.