If you don't know Unix, please contact CICA at 855-6972 and make an appointment for one of our staff members to assist you in converting your image files. There are two basic types of 2D image files. One is called a raster image , and the other is a drawing . A raster image is simply a rectangular grid of pixels, each pixel having a specified color. Black and white rasters are sometimes called bitmaps while greyscale or color rasters are sometimes called pixmaps .
Drawings contain commands for drawing lines, curves, text, etc.
Drawings may sometimes contain raster images as objects. Drawings, because they contain instructions for drawing objects within them, can usually be output at any resolution and are much harder to convert to other formats. This document will mainly deal with raster images rather than drawing formats, although some drawing formats can be converted with the utilities discussed here. To complicate the lives of everyone dealing with graphics, the computer graphics industry has developed hundreds of different formats for storing raster images, and very few standards. As a result, it is sometimes a confusing and difficult task to get an existing image file into a format that you can use for a particular application.