best image format for icons in display and in print

Question

I write text that should be both shown on screen and printed as a book. The text contains small icons, which are 20x20 pixels on screen, but to make it look better in print, I use 100x100 JPG images with 20% scaling. Still, on screen it doesn't look very good. Is there another image format which would produce better results in this setting?

Answer 1

You'd probably want to use a lossless format -- either PNG (Portable Network Graphics), or even better, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) if you have access to a program that can create it (e.g. Inkscape on Linux, or Adobe Illustrator on Windows or Mac).

It's probably best to err on the side of caution and future-proof your icons by making them larger than necessary too, say 200x200.

Answer 2

Maybe you should try vector images for print. It doesn't matter if you're printing it on a A6 or A1, the quality stays the same because the whole image is made up of calculations instead of pixels.

Anyway, I suggest you should read this article about image quality: http://www.actionprintinginc.com/support12.php

Let me know if it helps you