2012/3/23 Liam R E Quin <l...@holoweb.net>: > On Fri, 2012-03-23 at 21:52 +0100, Olivier wrote: > >> Considering the quality rating in JPEG as a percentage would mean that >> a quality equal to 100 would be perfect, i.e. no loss at all. > Nonsense. A "quality" of 100% means you have chosen 100 out of a > possible 100. "per cent" means "out of 100" in Latin. It says nothing > about secondary values. A value of 75% means 75% of the way from 0 to > the maximum allowed value of 100. I agree that popular usage is to infer > more than is stated from such an assertion. Note that in general (but > not in this case) percentages can be greater than 100.
A percentage is a way of expressing a ratio. 20% means the same as 20/100 or 1/5. It's used to express how large/small one quantity is, relative to another quantity. Here, what is the other quantity? In degrees centigrade, the temperature of liquid water ranges from 0 to 100. Does that mean that water at a temperature of 30 degrees is 30%? 30% of what? Notice that most descriptions of the quality factor of JPEG carefully avoid speaking of percentages. See for example http://docs.gimp.org/2.8/en/gimp-images-out.html#idp11992944 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG. -- Olivier Lecarme _______________________________________________ gimp-user-list mailing list gimp-user-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user-list
