Since my last post was about “pixels”, it got me thinking… a lot of people get confused about what a vector image is versus a bitmap or raster image.  Maybe I can help clear things up a bit.

First of all, computers have to save all of the information they use somewhere.  That information ultimately gets stored as a string of ones and zeros in the memory – be it the current RAM or archived on a hard disk.  But how those ones and zeros are encoded can make a big difference when storing images.

Bitmaps

Let’s start with Bitmap (or raster) images.  Picture a big piece of graph paper and let’s draw a big smiley face on it.  In each of the squares of that graph paper, you could essentially assign it a color value.  The color value would be broken up into Red, Green and Blue values each between 0 (meaning none) and 255 (meaning full color).  Sure, that’s a lot of information for a computer to store, but they’re good at that.

You could imagine that as you’re drawing your nice round smiley face that some squares will be covered up only partially.  The computer might handle that by storing a lighter shade of the color for that square, thus blurring the jagged edge a bit.   But ALL the squares are accounted for in a bitmap – no more no less.

You might also think to yourself “wow, there’s a lot of white space on this paper – do all those squares need to be stored too”?  Of course they do.  The computer can’t guess or take shortcuts so it has to store each square with a value even if it’s blank.  Now there are many compression methods like JPEG, GIF, and PNG that will take a bitmap image and reduce the redundant information drastically, but that’s a topic for a future post!

Bitmaps are great for storing pictures and other busy information.  But what about text, lines, objects that you want to be able to resize?

Vectors

Vector images are a completely different idea altogether.  The easiest way to think of vector is a set of instructions.  If I tell the computer to draw a smiley face,  I can do that with a relatively small set of instructions.  For example, to start you could tell the computer to draw a circle starting at the middle of the screen and with a radius of say 200px.  That piece of information when encoded into little ones and zeros can be extremely compact!

But efficiency isn’t the only benefit of vector graphics.  Now that I have instructions for how to create my circle, I can easily modify it as well.  I could stretch it and shrink it and all it does is change the original instructions without affecting the quality.

Imagine I have a graph paper 200 squares wide by 200 squares tall.  If I drew my smiley face on it and then saved it as a bitmap, that information is etched in stone.  Now I want to make my smiley face 400 squares by 400 squares big.  You can imagine the quality is going to degrade.  I’d have to “create” information by averaging values for all the new squares created.

But not with vectors.  If my graph paper gets bigger, I just make the definition of my circle bigger.  The magic is in the fact that the computer is constantly calculating which squares to light up depending on the definition of the object and the resolution of the “graph paper”.

There have been some recent changes to the income tax return filing deadlines for partnership returns (1065) but most have remained the same for the past several years. Extended partnership returns have been moved up to a September 15 deadline to allow individuals to file their returns on time by giving them a 1-month lag.

Here are the deadlines for the most common types of entities:

Individuals (1040) – April 15^th – 6-month extension to October 15^th available.

Partnerships (1065) – April 15^th – 5-month extension to September 15^th available.

Corporations (1120 & 1120S) – March 15^th – 6-month extension to September 15^th available.

Non-Profits (990) – May 15^th – 3-month extension available to August 15^th. Additional 3-month extension available to November 15^th.

LLCs – By default, LLCs are taxed as partnerships, but an election can be made to be taxed as an S-Corporation. Either way, the above deadlines apply.

All of the above dates assume the year end is December 31, which is the case for the vast majority of taxpayers. If your company has a different year end than December 31, the deadline would encompass the same amount of time. For example, if you were a corporation with a June 30 year end, your return would be due September 15^th with a 6-month extension available.

Visit topic www.arizonacpa.com for more information on this topic.

People always seem to get confused when talking about graphics for the web. How do pixels and dots-per-inch relate to each other? What should I use 72dpi or 96dpi? Hopefully I can shed some light on the subject and you can buy me a t-shirt like this…

First of all, “dots-per-inch” or DPI is really only a term that you need to know if you’re dealing with printed materials. Different printers have different capabilities and the best way to measure that is the number of dots you can fit in one inch. Although useful for the printing industry, DPI doesn’t really affect at website developer too much.

In the web world it’s easiest to think of everything in terms of Pixels. An average monitor can have a resolution of anywhere from 800px by 600px to 1600 by 1200px. Of course there are many of variations, but these are just examples. When designing web graphics, you want your website to be able to fit on the average person’s screen.  Well, it’s 2010 and 800×600 monitors are slowly becoming dinosaurs so most people have been desiging web pages to be about 900px wide. If you think about your world as 900px wide, then you are done -that’s it – no more thinking to do!

So what’s the DPI setting in my graphics program for? Really, that just affects how that program will try to print an image on the page. If I have a 900px wide image and set the resolution to 72dpi, the program is going to print the image about 12.5 inches wide (900 ÷ 72) (and it’s not going to look too hot if there’s only 72 dots in one inch)!  But if you set your program to 300dpi and try to print, the output is going to be about 3 inches (900 ÷ 300).

See how that works?  You’re not really affecting your original image at all.  You’ve always only had 900px wide to play with and stuff juicy graphics into.  If you want to print that image at 12.5 inches wide, you’re going to see a result of 72dpi.  If you want to print it at 3 inches wide, a much crisper 300dpi will result.

The reason it’s important to know this is because once you export a file as a JPG, the dpi settings are essentially lost, they were just a fancy setting in your graphics program.  All you’re left with is a JPG file measured in Pixels.  So think of your end user.  Are you making a web graphic?  Then that’s easy – 900px wide will display on 900px of the user’s monitor, doesn’t matter what size monitor they have (19″, 21″ etc).  If their monitor resolution is set to 1200px wide, you’ve got a lot of extra space.  800px wide, you’ve overshot it.

But if you’re sending a pic to Grandma to print on her new inkjet printer, and you want the absolute best clarity it can print of 1200dpi, then your 900px wide snapshot would print only 3/4″ wide (900 ÷ 1200)!  You want her to be able to print a 6″ wide image at 1200dpi, then you better be giving her a 7200px wide file (6 x 1200).

Make sense?  Figure out everything in Pixels – add dots per inch only when worrying about printing…