Importing graphics

[mwolfthal]

Does anyone have any comments about the relative merits of importing graphics via pdf, png, gif etc.?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Import by reference or by copying?

[mwolfthal]

Either.

[Bob_Niland]

What are the intended output workflows? (HTML, PDF, eBook, print, etc)

What are the image types? (vector, raster, and any text within)

Is color management required?

The above considerations materially affect selection of optimal import object types.

[mwolfthal]

Could be any of the above. The point of my question was to know if there are any guidelines that cover the overall issue.

[4everJang]

Never use copy-in, always reference.

For photos use JPEG, for bitmap-types use PNG, for drawings use SVG.

[Barb Binder]

Hi @mwolfthal:

I'm all about streamlining my workflow: I import photos as .psd files (native Photoshop) and line art/illustrations as .ai (native Illustrator files). I don't convert either so that I can edit the artwork in the original application. 

If you are using other apps besides those two and you will need to convert your artwork, keep in mind that .gif files are limited to 256 colors total (that may exclude it from your workflow) and jpg files (developed for archiving photographs) are lossy so saving them repeatedly will cause irretrievable data loss. Png is a more modern format that you might consider, but personally, I go with pdf if I'm importing Excel charts, for example.

~Barb

[mwolfthal]

Here's an example of an image I need to import, pdf and png formats.

[frameexpert]

If your only output is print and/or PDF, I would use PDF as the import format. This will give you good clarity of the user zooms up on the content when viewing it.

[Bob_Niland]

Since you have PDFs with the musical charts as vector+character, preserve that into the output. Import-by-ref as PDF. You might at some point need to inspect the incoming PDFs for metadata that you don't want to be forwarding (or which needlessly balloons the file size).

And now for something, completely different:
In the vec+char PDF, the musical notation glyphs decode as from the Unicode U+Exxx PUA (private use area) range. For any use, the font embedding must be preserved into the output, or the end product is going to show a useless substitution character such as an empty box. Whoever commissioned this work may have provided you with a font for those glyphs: use it as needed in body text.

Those music glyphs are actually now standard Unicode characters, in the U+1D21x range, but even if you have a font that populates that block, you can't use them in FM. FM only supports BMP (U+0000 … U+FFFF). U+10000 and higher don't render in edit or output {yet}.