Documentation: keyboard chart is illegible

[posfan12]

The keyboard chart on the second to last page of the Celestia PDF manual is illegible. Either increase the resolution, or use a vector drawing instead.

And if you're going to keep the bitmap image, then use the PNG format instead of JPG. JPG is for photographs, not glyphs and charts.

[t00fri]

The keyboard chart on the second to last page of the Celestia PDF manual is illegible. Either increase the resolution, or use a vector drawing instead.

That Celestia manual was prepared as a MS Word file originally and converted to PDF for non-windows users. The readability in the .doc original is much better.

However, instead of this outdated manual, I recommend to use the up-to-date Celestia -Wikibook:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Celestia

You can always look up the key-shortcuts while Celestia is running under Help->controls

And if you're going to keep the bitmap image, then use the PNG format instead of JPG. JPG is for photographs, not glyphs and charts.

I disagree with your statement that the JPG format is basically unsuited for textual content.

Sure, JPG is a lossy format (unlike PNG). But the usual reason for bad rendering of text in saved JPG format is that most people are ignorant to use the proper settings! This is however not a fault of the JPG format itself

Here are the JPG settings that I use in GIMP since many years with excellent results:

Quality: 85% ................................ <== the default of 75% may also be OK, depending on text size
Subsampling: 1x1, 1x1, 1x1.......<=== crucial
DCT method: float

Most "simple" programs use default or hardcoded settings corresponding to a subsampling of 2x1, 1x1, 1x1, or WORSE! If quality JPG saving is desired, appropriate software should be used, of course.

You are invited to try this out yourself, e.g. in GIMP . With these high-quality settings, also small text is rendered excellently in JPGs, while the file size is still reasonably compressed!

Fridger

PS:
Another widespread misconfiguration concerns the PNG format: often, the highest compression level 9 is used by default. Notably for very large PNG files, such a tight compression may take a pretty long time and the decompression during file loading is also very SLOW.

Instead, use compression level 4! It is an OPTIMAL setting as to speed AND size! Quality is of course identical.