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bitmap
Any picture you see on the Web (or hot off a scanner, or on a page created with a desktop publishing application) is called a bitmap. As its name suggests, a bitmap is a map of dots--similar to what you see when you look at a newspaper photo under a strong magnifying glass--that looks like a picture when viewed from a distance. Bitmaps come in many file formats (GIF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PICT, and PCX, to name a few) and can be read by paint programs and image editors such as Adobe Photoshop. If you zoom in on or try to scale up a bitmap, it will look blocky. Digital pictures that you can easily scale up (such as those created in PostScript, CorelDraw, or CAD formats) are called vector graphics. |