Question

I used to post image with text in it. These are generally a screenshot. The problem comes when I resize it to fit in my web page. Text inside image becomes very difficult to read.

Is there any free small tool available for re-sizing images without destroying its quality for text inside it?

If the above mentioned tool can work for me then it is better. But how to achieve it?

Answer 1

The short answer is no, there isn’t much you can do.

Most fonts are defined as vector graphics, and these can be scaled without loss of detail.

When you draw text on a bitmap these vector fonts are rendered to the bitmap. The render process converts the vector graphics to a bitmap at the requested size, and applies techniques such as antialiasing to make the bitmap text look its best, but only at that resolution.

When you take that bitmap and scale it using GIMP or other image manipulation tools, the text has lost its vector origins and is just a collection of pixels. The scaled bitmap will not have the proper antialiasing, it will just have the antialiasing of the original text scaled down, and that will look pretty bad. If you render the original vector font at the reduced size and put it side by side with the scaled down bitmap you’ll find a huge difference.

In short, if you need text that can be scaled and still look good, then your only choice is to use a vector graphics format, like SVG, Flash, or EPS.