Support for reading and editing PDF files is much more limited. Those tools work with any program that is able to print. (third party tools that perform the same task are also for sale). Further information on the SVG format may be found on the official SVG website.Īdobe's PDF format (Portable Document Format) is very widely used as a general purpose platform-independent document format.Īnd while it is not exclusively used as such, it is also a very good vector image format.Īdobe gives away the Acrobat PDF reader, but sells the tools required to create PDF files Inkscape and recent versions of Adobe IllustratorĪnd CorelDRAW have good support for reading and writing SVG. The W3C standard vector image format is called SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). Ghostview can read it very well but does not have any editing capabilities.
It is widely supported as an export format, but due to the complexity of the full format specification, not all programs that claim to support EPS are able to import all variants of it.Īdobe Illustrator and recent versions of CorelDRAW have very good support for reading and writing EPS. It is the standard interchange format in the print industry. In any case, all of the variants of BMP should be avoided when possible, as they use little to noĬompression and consequently have unnecessarily large file sizes.Īdobe's EPS format (Encapsulated PostScript) is perhaps the most common vector image format. Most modern image editing tools are able to read both. Own formats, both of which are called BMP. There are actually several BMP formats (BitMaP). Vector Magic recommends using the PNG format when storing logos as bitmaps. This format is widely supported by web browsers and image viewers/editors.
The best of the lossless image formats is called PNG (Portable Network Graphics). They are more suitable for things like logos. These store an exact pixel-by-pixel representation of the image, but require more space. We do not recommend using JPEG files for rasterized vector art, as the compression artifacts substantially degrade the quality of the image near edges. It has excellent compression characteristics and has the nice feature that the user may specify what level of compression they desire, trading off fidelity for file size. One of the most widely-used image formats. They are also commonly used on the web to save bandwidth.
They are best suited to photographs and other images where perfect accuracy is not important. These have smaller file sizes but do not store a perfect copy of the image. Some of the most common are: JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, and TIFF.īroadly speaking, they fall into two categories: Lossy formats You can include subtitles and chapter markers in the conversion, and even convert batches of files at once.There is a large number of different bitmap formats. Rather than writing over the original file, VLC will create a separate copy of the newly-reformatted video. The application will ask you to pick a video file from the hard drive, and you can then choose the format you want to change it into.
With the program open on screen, choose Media, then Convert/Save. Think of it as a Swiss Army knife for video conversions. It can also convert a broad selection of different file types. Beyond that, Handbrake can rip videos from DVDs and supports subtitles and chapter markers in your conversions.Įqually impressive, VLC Media Player (for Windows, macOS, and Linux) can play a whole host of video formats, including MPEG-4, H.264, WMV, and MKV with no extra plug-ins. When you’re more comfortable with the software, you can dig deeper into the settings for the codecs-the exact standards by which the video files are saved. It’s simple to operate and even lets you pick from standard pre-set modes in order to, say, optimize the videos you’re converting for an iPhone X. Handbrake (for Windows, macOS, and Linux) takes video files from almost every imaginable format and converts them into any other popular video type.
For your video conversion needs, you can’t go wrong with the free programs Handbrake and VLC.