Exporting Drawings to Other Formats

Now that you've made a great drawing, you need to get it into a format that you can put in a Web page, scale up for a poster or down for a bumper sticker, or just put in your document. You'll also need to consider what steps to take to make it scale well.

Exporting to Other Raster or Vector File Formats

Note

If you have problems printing transparent graphics, see Specifying Print Settings for Bitmaps, Transparency, and Color /Grayscale on page 87.

1. If you want to only export part of the drawing, select the item or items.

2. Choose File > Export.

3. Navigate to the correct folder and enter a file name .

4. Select the Automatic file name extension option if you want Draw to fill it in automatically. Select Selection if you only want to export what's selected in the drawing.

5. Select a file format, and enter options when prompted to do so; information is provided in Table 29-1.

   Note

   The HTML export option starts the HTML export feature described in Creating an HTML Version of Your Presentation on page 733.

6. Click Save.

Table 29-1. Graphics file formats

Format	Options
BMP	Bitmap. Bitmaps usually have very large file sizes. Color resolution Select the color depth. Some depths allow you to use RLE Encoding, a lossless compression scheme for bitmaps. Mode Select Original to leave the size unchanged; select Resolution to change the dots per inch of the image; select Size to change the size of the image.
EMF	Enhanced metafile. Mode Choose the original size or a modified size. Size If you want the exported version to be a different size, enter that size here.
EPS	Encapsulated PostScript. Vector format, excellent for scaling. Level 2 PostScript level seems to work best. Be sure to select Color; default is Grayscale. Preview You might want to select both if you're not sure how well you'll be able to print it. Some printers can't handle the actual EPS so print the preview mode. For each you select, a preview graphic in the specified format will be exported along with the actual PostScript file. TIFF preview provides a TIFF raster graphic. If you mark EPSI, a monochrome preview graphic in the EPSI format will be exported together with its PostScript file. This format contains only printable characters of the 7-bit ASCII code. Version Select the PostScript level you want to use. For Level 1, compression is not available. Select Level 1 if your PostScript printer doesn't have Level 1 capabilities. Select Level 1 if your output device supports colored bitmaps, palette graphics and compressed graphics. Color format Select color or gray scale. The default is grayscale. Compression If you want the data exported in compressed format, select the LZW Encoding option. Text settings Select whether text is exported with or without the information on the contour form of each individual character.
GIF	Graphics interchange format. Supports 256 colors; better for high-contrast images. Mode Select Interlaced if you want the image to be displayed in a series of passes by browsers. Drawing objects Select Save transparent to make the background transparent. Only the objects will then be visible in the GIF image. Use the Eyedropper if you want to later set a color for the transparent value.
JPG	Joint photographic experiments group . Best choice for photographs and other scanned images; supports up to 16.7 million colors. Use this format if low file size is important; it may sacrifice image quality. Recommended for Web use. Quality Enter a number below 100 if you want to reduce the file size; doing so also reduces some of the detail in the image Color resolution Select Grayscale or True Colors.
MET	OS/2 metafile. Mode Choose the original size or a modified size. Size If you want the exported version to be a different size, enter that size here.
PBM	Portable bitmap, originally developed to use with email. File format Select Binary or Text format. Text results in a file size approximately 8 times bigger than binary.
PCT	Mac Pict. Mode Choose the original size or a modified size. Size If you want the exported version to be a different size, enter that size here.
PGM	Portable grayscale map, originally developed to use with email. File format Select Binary or Text format. Text results in a file size approximately 4 times bigger than binary.
PNG	Portable network graphic. Handles 24-bit color and better. Recommended for Web use (not supported by all browsers). Lets you save up to 16 million colors without compression. Mode Enter the compression. 9 is the highest quality. Numbers below 9 may result in loss of quality. Interlaced Select Interlaced if you want the image to be displayed in a series of passes by browsers.
PPM	Portable pixel map, originally developed to use with e-mail. File format Select Binary or Text format. Text results in a file size approximately 4 times bigger than binary.
RAS	Sun raster file. No save options.
SVG	Scalable vector graphics. Vector format excellent for scaling; stored in an XML format. Readable by Illustrator 9. No save options.
SVM	StarView metafile. Mode Enter the compression. 9 is the highest quality. Numbers below 9 may result in loss of quality. Interlaced Select Interlaced if you want the image to be displayed in a series of passes by browsers.
TIF	Tagged image file format. Very high quality and file size. No save options.
WMF	Windows metafile. Mode Enter the compression. 9 is the highest quality. Numbers below 9 may result in loss of quality. Interlaced Select Interlaced if you want the image to be displayed in a series of passes by browsers.
XPM	Supports up to 256 colors, and can be used in C programs. No save options.

Making Images Scale Well

When you increase or decrease the size of a raster object, the new size usually doesn't look that good. Vector objects based on lines are better for resizing. Use Bezier curves or lines when possible; see page 799 in particular. Also, export graphics to SVG or EPS, both of which scale well, rather than to GIF or JPG. Or convert objects to curves or polygons where possible. Right-click an object and choose Convert, then the type to convert to.