CompuServe Messages

The Kodak format is very good for 24 bit scans but it can be sometimes hard to translate to other formats depending on the applications used. Scanning in a vector format would be a nightmare involving a whole separate computer just to do the math, so, yes, all scanning is by nature bitmap. I've gotten very good results with TIFF, particularly 5.0 and above, and this is supported by virtually every graphics program and file transfer utility I know. Stay away from PCX; while color info is fine, it contains no size info at all and will expand to fill any empty spaces in other programs. CorelTrace, I know, does match fills; the problem is that it converts CYMK to RGB so set your final colors in RGB if vectorizing rather than depending on, say, Draw, to retain PhotoShop CYMK values–it won't. When embedding bitmaps, the thing to remember is that, unlike vector, you won't get any higher resolution from your bitmap embedded in an EPS file than you had at the start. This means scanning in at a high dpi rate if at all possible, even at the cost of huge file sizes. Many scanners, like the new HPIICx, can do interpolated scans to TIFF as high as 1600 dpi, but make sure you have one heck of a large (and empty) hard disk or optical drive!