Forward Biased

Greetings, programs! (Sticky)

Welcome to my “great experiment!”

Normally there isn't anything special about another DIY electronics site, as there are thousands of such sites already on the net, some maybe even better than this one (!).  This under-appreciated fact alone gives me ample reason not to waste my time or yours with just another "me-too" site, but I think this site does have a bit of a different perspective.  And what might that be, you ask? (or maybe you don't ask...but here comes the answer anyway, because I don’t have the “Mind Reader v2.0” add-in compatible with Firefox v4.0.1.)

About drawing file formats

I suppose you’ll have noticed that I posted the first part of the schematic for the tweeter DC protection circuit in the .png image format.  (You can left-click on the image to enlarge it, or right-click then “Save image as…” to download it to your computer for later reference.)  While I create these drawings with SmartDraw, and I love the program for making drawings, most of you probably don’t have that app on your computer, whilst most of you can display common image formats such as .jpg and .png without even having to stop and open a rendering program, as it opens automatically.

Having experimented a good deal with exporting drawings in various formats—I originally really wanted to use the .pdf format for everything—I realized that, in order to achieve decent image quality (for both viewing and printing) without requiring everyone to download some huge multi-megabyte file every time they want a drawing, I had three choices:

1.)  Post the SmartDraw-format file and ask everyone to download and install the free version of SmartDraw.  This program does not leave a particularly small footprint, especially if you’re using it only to read these drawings.  (SmartDraw used to publish a free “SmartDraw Reader,” much like Acrobat reader—which would allow everyone to open these files—but they no longer do this.)

To my mind that is pretty ridiculous.  Nothing against the app, this just isn't a reasonable thing to expect everyone to do.

2.)  Post the files in Windows Enhanced-metafile format, which has excellent quality but a large file size and (presumed) incompatibility with non-Windows computers.

3.)  Use an image format such as .jpg or .png.  These are useable by pretty much everyone, Windows or not, and have reasonable file sizes.  All things considered, .png won.

But…if for some reason this turned out to be a bad choice, e.g. if it turns out that many people don’t have software that can render .png files or some other such thing, then I’ll need to change that.  Let me know—unless I hear from you that .png files are a problem, I’ll assume everything is all right.