Computer Novice

[Laura]

That's the spirit! =D>
Laura

[Dz]

When I have sent documents to people, I scan them in and save as jpg. and then send them.

While this is better than nothing at all, most documents (which are very often simply black-and-white printing/writing) - would be better off scanned and sent in one of the 2-color compressed formats: GIF or TIF.
The important thing is that you scan it as "two color line art" (or similar wording, sometimes called "bitmap"). GIFs are more universally viewable by the person on the other end.

Today I have received some docs from a fellow researcher and they are in the following formats:- tif, png. I have also seen bmp. at some point.

Both the TIF and the PNG are fine formats for such things. You likely will be able to directly view the PNG in your browser.
Ignore BMPs from point-and-click windows eejits - though they too are better than nothing at all. At least they can be converted to something more appropriate for storage/transmittal - and a lot smaller.

What are all these different formats and when should you use them?

In descending order of utility/increasing size order:

For DOCUMENTS: TIF (grp 4 fax-compressed - NOT LZW or grayscale), PNG (grp 4 fax-compressed), GIF (2-color).

For color PHOTOS: JPG, PNG, GIF, PCX, TIF.

For Black-and-white PHOTOS: GIF (grayscale), JPG (grayscale), PNG (grayscale), PCX (grayscale), TIF (grayscale).

NOTE: Every reduction in the number of colors makes the file smaller - usually with no reduction in readability. Amazing file size reductions are possible for b/w documents sent as Grp4 TIFs, compared to 24-bit TIFs or JPGs.

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[Jean Jeanie]

That's much clearer. thank you.

What do you think Ellen?

No paracetamol required today

Jean

[ellenavon]

Yep, I think I've just about got the gist of that.

Might need the paracetamol later, after the rugby tho'. Our boys are hanging in there well, so I'm off to watch the rest of it.

Cheers

Ellen.

[Malcolm]

Jean
Try some lateral thinking, use the post
MM