Saving as from Family historian

[nelmit]

Help!!!!

I have found somebody who will print a small family tree (1050mm x 297mm) I have done for my cousin's 40th birthday but when I try to save it to a format the company can work from I can't get a clear picture. I've tried saving as a psd, jpg, bmp and tif but they are all 'pixelated' after the transfer.

I'm sure somebody out there can help but the bad news is I need it for tomorrow.

Here's hoping,
Annette M

[Alcluith]

Annette

If you go to Infranview website and download the free software it will give you the option to save in various formats.
Pick one that suits your printer company .

http://www.irfanview.net/

Drew

[Currie]

Hello Annette,

Sorry if I’ve missed the boat with this reply. I’m not familiar with the software you’re using and I don’t know what formats are required by the printing company so I’ll just rattle on with a few generalities.

To produce a printed image 297mm x 1050mm at say 200dpi (and the company might want more) would require an image 2400x8400 pixels. If the image is much smaller than that it probably isn’t suitable for printing, hence the pixilation. The pixilation will probably look worse on the printed chart than it does on screen.

An absolutely empty plain white BMP, uncompressed TIF and PSD about that size is around 60mb, a LZW compressed TIF about 600kb, while a minimally compressed JPG is around 300kb. A lot of older low-end graphics programs and older computers will fall over rather than look at a 60mb image. All these figures will be increased by the content of the chart.

On the face of it a compressed TIF might be the way to go if the end result looks right and the format is suitable. JPG images aren’t particularly suitable for graphics such as family trees charts because of their inbuilt fuzziness although you might be able to get away with it if you keep compression to a minimum.

All these image types are bitmaps and all they produce are very large ‘photographs’ of your chart. It is possible the company wants things in a vector format, which you can magnify forever without pixilation, and which is probably more suitable, but is another thing entirely.

It all comes down to the formats your family history software is capable of producing and the formats the printing company’s software is capable of processing. Irfanview should be able to handle the translation if it’s a bitmap matter.

A company that specialises in such charts would probably have more flexibility in these matters than one that doesn’t. If the printing company can produce the results from specialised data files produced by specific family history programs they’re probably not working with an actual bitmap file. However you may still have to make sure any embedded photos are the correct size etc.

It’s possibly not the best thing to try to sort out in a hurry, but if you did manage to sort it out in time, congratulations and let us know how you went. If you didn’t then, if you like, you could come back with program names, required formats, the name of the printer doing the job etc and someone might be able to help.

Hope this helps a bit,
All the best,
Alan

[nelmit]

Thanks Drew and Alan, I'll let you know how I get on.

Kind regards,
Annette M