Scribus supports a broad range of bitmap formats, but you should avoid most of them for serious print jobs. These formats are (in alphabetical order):
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This not only looks unprofessional, but can be an expensive mistake. Most websites use JPEGs, GIFs or – increasingly – PNGs. Remember that, no matter what format they use, most web page graphics have a resolution of 72–96 DPI, which is far too low for a print workflow. Scribus can generate PDFs with 4000 dpi, but for most purposes 300 dpi is a reasonable resolution. If you have any doubts and want to carefully check an image before it’s printed, make a PDF, then view it in a PDF viewer under high magnification.
JPEG images, by their design, use lossy compression. In the process of editing and/or compressing a JPEG file, data will be discarded and permanently lost. Moreover, there is a type of JPEG called “progressive,” which is pure poison in a commercial print workflow. A progressive JPEG is the type that partially displays as it is downloading in a web browser. Scribus will neither load, nor export progressive JPEGs.
Another issue with JPEG files is that every time you open, edit, and save them in an image editing program you will lose image data. So if you need to edit a JPEG file (e.g. one from your digital camera), save it in another format, like TIFF, before you start applying any changes.
Why TIFF?
For high-level PostScript printing there are three kinds of file formats that work well for images like photos and anything that is made up of pixels and have been time-tested: TIFF, tif and Tiff.
No matter which way you spell it, the Tagged Image File Format is the file format for bitmap images if you’re preparing a file for commercial printing.
tifficc
or embed an ICC profile in many bitmap editors.There is a large number of TIFF variants, some very esoteric and requiring a particular display program. In addition, not every image editor saves them with the same fidelity to the standards. GIMP, through its use of libtiff, shared with Scribus, does a fine job of supporting TIFFs. One way to work with files from GIMP is to save the original file in the native GIMP XCF format and then, once edited to your satisfaction, export as a TIFF or, with screen shots meant for the web, PNG.
PNG is an exception to the aforementioned rule, especially for screenshots. PNG has a number of advanced features, like ICC profile support and real alpha transparency. PNG also compresses very well, and can show a much better result than JPEG where there are sharp transitions in color and contrast. The only time JPEG may be preferable over PNG is for photos with high dynamic range, mostly for reasons of size on a web page. For creating PDFs with screenshots, PNG is superb and will print well, as long as you do not make any scaling adjustments that reduce the image size. So if you have a screenshot, which is typically at 72–96dpi, but you need to shrink it, do so by scaling the image in an image manipulation program or within Scribus. Whenever you are scaling screenshots, disable re-sampling in any image editor. With screenshots you should never reduce the number of pixels or you will lose sharpness quickly.