Understanding vectors and bitmaps If you know enough
Understanding vectors and bitmaps If you know enough about graphics to understand the difference between bitmap and vector graphics, feel free to skip this section. (We hope you always feel free.) Bitmaps are created with lots of dots. Put them all together, and you get a picture. On-screen, they re displayed as pixels. As you can imagine, it can take a large file to store the information about all the dots in a bitmap. Another problem with bitmaps is that they don t scale up well. If you try to enlarge a bitmap, it starts to look grainy because you see all those dots (as in the left example shown in Figure 2-3). Vector graphics are defined with equations that specify lines, shapes, and locations. Blank space doesn t have to be recorded, and the equations are particularly efficient at storing information. As a result, file sizes are usually smaller than bitmap file sizes. Vector graphics are infinitely scalable, either up or down. No matter how big you make your graphic, it always looks perfect, as shown in the right example in Figure 2-3. In fact, your graphic might even look better when it s larger because the curves are smoother. Flash creates vector-based graphics. The small size of the files means that Flash Player files load and play super-fast on a Web page. As you undoubtedly know, fast file-loading means that your Web page viewers don t have to wait a long time to see your effects. That s the advantage of Flash. Nevertheless, you can create great graphics with bitmaps that you can t duplicate with vector graphics, and we explain how to import bitmaps in Chapter 3. Figure 2-3: Bitmaps lose focus when enlarged (left); vector graphics remain sharp and clear (right). 36 Part I: A Blast of Flash
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