And why you should never send us anything in either file format.
Since the Millstone launched back in 2011, we’ve posted about 20,000 articles, ads, billboard items and miscellaneous other stuff. Most of those started as submissions from you, our readers, and arrived via email.
The files you send are usually in formats we can use easily online (MS Word, JPG, plain text), but not always. Two formats are a real nuisance, and here’s why.
PDF files are intended to render an exact copy of your original document — often an MS Word file — complete with all the formatting, graphics, and so on. PDF does not work at all well online, for various reasons, and we need to convert them to a usable format. This often doesn’t go smoothly.
Please, never send PDF files, period. Send the original file you made the PDF from.
PNG
The PNG image is a new-ish file format compared to old standbys like JPG, and is suitable for some online purposes such as logos or simple charts.
However, photos or posters saved in PNG format are generally about 10 times bigger than the equivalent JPG file. This means they are slower to load at the reader’s end, and take up additional space in our hosting account, which costs us money over time.
Annoyingly, many online services that generate posters and other graphics, like Canva, provide them in PNG format by default.
Whenever you have the option to choose the file format, use JPG (or better still WebP, if that option is offered.) That way we don’t have to convert them manually.
With humble thanks from the editors.
