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  #11  
Old 08-09-2007, 09:40 PM
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Gnasher Gnasher is offline
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That's what I love about this forum, you ask a simple question and you get lots of great advice.

I previously used the GIMP with Ghostscript to sucessfully recolour Epsons letters ( I guess I should have asked the legal question then, I only thought about it now with a complex recolour), so I know that works. The Airbus pdfs can be turned into jpgs using the same method.

Maurice and Tim, you mentioned vector files. What is the advantage of using vector files rather than straight jpgs? I have used Cutepdf a lot to "print" pdfs, so either method (GIMP / Cutepdf) is possible.

This is getting complicated! Is there a tutorial/thread somewhere on recolouring?

Gerardo, I think pictures are a long way off!
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  #12  
Old 08-09-2007, 09:44 PM
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Vector files scale up and down perfectly, while jpegs and other standard images don't. They pixelize and lose quality.
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  #13  
Old 08-09-2007, 11:58 PM
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Gnasher

I never checked if the file opened in Ghostview - sometimes they do sometimes they don't - I think it depends on the settings.
I'd suggest that if you are not thinking of resizing you could stay with the bitmap/jpg thing in Gimp for this one . The vector file is a bit of a mess to work on but Tim is more knowledgeable than I am on vector "pretty pictures".
Inkscape is the open source vector equivalent of the Gimp.

Tim

I assume you're working in Coreldraw, do you have Canvas installed and have you tried it. My suspicion is that Corel shreds the pdf vector detail more than Canvas.
Yes I know they should be the same but some animals are more equal than others and this seems also to apply to the internal format conversion engines of different programmes.

Hey Fozz

Careful there, people might think you thought I was actually suggesting buying something. I only mentioned the free trial.:D
Having said that I reckon Win2pdf does a better "technical" job of the conversion than PDF Creator. It also works on Win 98.
I haven't tried printing a trial Win2pdf, minus the tagline page, to Creator.
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  #14  
Old 08-10-2007, 05:56 AM
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Fozzy The Bear Fozzy The Bear is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by maurice View Post
It also works on Win 98..
The current version won't run or even install on Win98 Maurice. I know because I tried it. Earlier versions may run on Win98 but they're no longer available.

The spec listed by them is:
*********************************************
System Requirements
  • Pentium-compatible PC.
  • Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 or above, Windows x64, and Windows Server 2003* (If Terminal Services are enabled, the Win2PDF Terminal Server Edition would be required)..
  • PDF-compatible reader to view the files (see links page).
We do not support Windows 95, 98, Me, or the Macintosh.
************************************************** **

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)
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  #15  
Old 08-10-2007, 06:48 AM
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wunwinglow wunwinglow is offline
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Maurice, no, I don't have Canvas, so I can't compare them. As you say, they 'should' be the same, so I haven't looked at other vector programs that might do a better job, 'cos I assumed they'd be as bad!

Gnasher, I just grew up using vector programs, so am much more familiar and comfortable with the way they work. Other get along perfectly well with bitmap software, but the essential difference is the way the components of the image are constructed. With a bitmap, you have a grid of coloured squares, so as you zoom into the detail, the blending your eye does to the tiny spots of colour cannot happen, and you start to see the individual squares, and that looks a bit messy. With a vector format, the shapes, their outlines and filled colours, levels of transparency and so on are stored as mathematical formulae so as you zoom in the image is recreated to suit, so a crisp line stays crisp however close you look at it.

The editting process is also entirely different; if you think of a vector image as a stack of bits of coloured paper, you can select, edit, scale, any of them individually at any time. With a bitmap, you can change the colour of individual, or groups of individual pixels, but they are all essentially independent of each other. More like a painting than a collage...

There are several freebie vector and bitmap programs available, give them a go an see which suites you; some designers use both, as appropriate for the effects they need. Both techniques have their good and bad points!

Tim
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  #16  
Old 08-10-2007, 07:30 AM
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Fozzy The Bear Fozzy The Bear is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wunwinglow View Post
There are several freebie vector and bitmap programs available, give them a go an see which suites you; some designers use both, as appropriate for the effects they need. Both techniques have their good and bad points!
Tim
I use both.... It really depends if you plan to rescale a model to make it larger, at a later date.

The real downside to vector versions is that it's impossible to use photographs or photographic textures to texture the surface of a model. While that's not always important, I tend to use a combination of photographic and hand drawn textures, so for me, I tend to use Adobe Photoshop most of all, and draw them at huge resolutions, which mean the model could actually be bigger, and then scale the parts down to the required size afterwards. While keeping the original source material stored at high resolutions for later use.

I guess Adobe Illustrator (vector Program) could do it but I really can't be bothered to spend the time learning it.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)
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  #17  
Old 08-10-2007, 08:34 AM
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I am just getting to grips with the GIMP, so I wanted to know whether I should stop and start learning Inkscape! The reason I asked was I had a little think about how to go about doing the recolouring and how to match up the lines on the different parts. This will especially difficult with the logo. I was just wondering if it would be easiler in GIMP or Inkscape, and if the technique would be different (so I could choose the easier option of course!).:D)
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  #18  
Old 08-10-2007, 09:27 AM
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wunwinglow wunwinglow is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Fozzy The Bear View Post
The real downside to vector versions is that it's impossible to use photographs or photographic textures to texture the surface of a model.(Fozzy The Bear)
Not sure I understand you Fozzie! Corel can import bitmaps into a vector document and they get treated just like any other object more or less, and I am sure there are fill with tiling options, as well as other techniques for filling with patterns, shades and so on.

Blends are another way of creating bitmap-like effects, both by blending the fill within a shape, and blending from one shape to another.

Tim
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  #19  
Old 08-10-2007, 06:26 PM
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A comment about Inkscape - the developers say it's designed to be a native SVG (scalable vector graphics) editor. It's an outgrowth of an older editor called Sodipodi but tries to strictly implement the SVG standard.

So what's SVG? It's a open vector graphics standard which was intended mostly for Web pages and is a direct competitor to Macromedia Flash. The idea is to have a 2D vector graphic description language which can fit seamlessly into Web pages and to be changed on the fly by other scripting languages like Javascript.

Is it better than Illustrator ? (Gimp is for raster graphic manipulation) - probably not - since the limit of Inkscape capability is governed by the SVG standard - you can do lots in SVG but not everything that a full featured graphics system can do.

I've just finished a project at work using SVG and although it works well it is an absolute pain to find enough information to be able to manipulate the SVG from Web pages. As usual the Microsoft browser doesn't support it
properly.

Regards,

Charlie
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  #20  
Old 08-10-2007, 06:37 PM
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Fozzy The Bear Fozzy The Bear is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wunwinglow View Post
Not sure I understand you Fozzie! Corel can import bitmaps into a vector document and they get treated just like any other object more or less, and I am sure there are fill with tiling options, as well as other techniques for filling with patterns, shades and so on.

Blends are another way of creating bitmap-like effects, both by blending the fill within a shape, and blending from one shape to another.

Tim
I think I missworded my original post, when I said "The real downside to vector versions is that it's impossible to use photographs or photographic textures to texture the surface of a model." What I should have said is: you can use photographic textures but that then destroys the scaleability of the vector model, because the bitmaps don't scale well and become pixelated when you try to upscale them.

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)
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Last edited by Fozzy The Bear; 08-10-2007 at 07:26 PM.
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