> >>JP(E)G is designed for photos (which the P stands for, I think) and > >>other graphics that require very fine color gradations. For graphics > >>like this, GIF is better. Can your viewer handle GIF? > >> > >> > > > >Yeah, but GIF is still under patent, and isn't all that good. > > > >How about PNG? > > > > Supporting PNG (or SVG) is obviously better but GIFs have been patent > free in the US since friday, 20th June 2003. Europe, Canada and Japan > patents run out in June this year (info from Kuro5hin - > http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/6/19/35919/4079). Please use PNG or > SVG instead of GIF but I wouldn't let the patent thing put you off GIFs > - just that the others are better ;-) I have an ADSL, which means I get 160K download, but only 11K upload. When you're downloading from my site, my server is uploading to you, so you get the slower speed. I did my best to preserve the scale but reduce the bandwidth (this is also why the map is in greyscale--it looked much better in color, and the difference between forest, hills, and forested hills was much clearer, but the smallest I could get it in color was about 900K). I chose JPEG because it produced the smallest file size. I used a compression of 53, I think, which was as high as I could go and still have readable text. This reduced my roughly 2000x2000 pixel image to about 200k. The best I could do with either GIF or PNG was much larger. Ditto for TIF. Bryan