In suggesting an alternative to using embedded Visio files and living with frequent crashes, strewth at rcn.com suggested: > You can also just save the Visio files as jpegs and import by reference. > Works for me.
Yes, you can use some standard graphic file format for intermediate files, but JPEG is the worst choice. For starters, it is a raster image format, which means you lose the vector characteristics of the underlying drawing. (WMF/EMF, PDF, and EPS would preserve the vector nature.) But besides that, JPEG is singularly unsuited for line art or drawings that include text because of the nature of its lossy image compression. If you look closely at line art saved in JPEG, you will see a kind of gray smudginess next to lines and surrounding text like a little cloud. This is an artifact caused by the JPEG image compression algorithm, which was optimized for *photographic* images, which are statistically *very* different from line art and which tend to mask these kinds of artifacts. JPEG is the only file format that inherently produces artifacts on line art. -Fred Ridder
