[Coco] Re: M.E.S.S. Printing

[KnudsenMJ at aol.com]

In a message dated 12/20/03 10:46:17 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
johnguin at hotmail.com writes:

> I thought another reason GIF lost popularity to JPG was JPGs were "lossy"
>  and could be compressed, but GIF was locked into "only" 256 colors and no
>  compression.

Well, those are certainly valid limitations of GIF.  I stopped using GIF for 
anything (other than line drawing schematics) after I upgraded to a PC with 
more than 256 colors.  Once I went to 24-bit truecolor, or even 16-bit 
highcolor, my previous GIF photos looked really grainy due to every pixel being forced 
into one of 256 colors.

And even with high quality compression, JPG files are smaller.  And with 
heavy compression, they almost shrink to nothing :-)

An experiment I should try is to see what happens if a straight BMP or TIFF 
file is run thru Zip or LHA compression.  That would be a way for us amateurs 
(who can barely figure out GIF and probably can't comprehend the FOurier 
transforms of JPG) to get reasonable file sizes on Coco or Linux screen dumps.  
--Mike K.