sharpen gif ??

[Christian Wenz]

i scaned a coulor picture with gimp and saved it in a gif-format. after
that i load it in xfig to add some arrows and such stuff and write it as
an eps-file. now i see that the edges of the picture are not so sharp as
i expect. if i save the same one as postscript and after work with xfig
as eps i get more sharp edges but a huge file. is there a way to improve
the quality of gif with gimp or is it more a problem of the gif-format
itself ???

Re: sharpen gif ??

[James Smaby]

most probably a problem of both gif and the tools you used.

Yes, I agree the tools were a poor choice.  Since this doesn't
solve your problem, just points out a new one, I'll try and be
helpfull by suggesting a new set of tools.  If all you want to
do is add arrows, you can do that from the gimp just fine.  If
you are saving as a black and white picture (somehow I imagine
you are), gif is fine.  This probably will not give you strait
edges without some tweaking, so it may be easier to create the
scanned in image with xfig instead of switching between analog
and digital.  If there is good reason to make your arrows with
xfig, you can import those arrows into gimp.  If there is some
reason that you want to go from gimp to xfig, so can save from
the gimp in postscript, or perhaps even try to convert between
bitmap and vector with autotrace:
http://homepages.go.com/~martweb/AutoTrace.htm
Hope that helped.
-James Smaby