|  |  | 4.3 Image objects

## 4.3 Image objects

Images are inserted using the Insert image ipelet (in the Ipelets menu). Once in a drawing, you can scale, stretch, and rotate an image. You can read in some scanned drawing and draw on top of it within Ipe. This is useful if you have a drawing on paper and want to make an Ipe version of it.

There are three functions for inserting images: one for images in general, one for JPEG images, and one for pasting from the clipboard.

If your image is in a lossless bitmap format such as PNG, GIF, or BMP, then the first function is appropriate. If your image is in JPEG (JPG) format, then the second function is the right one (it results in much smaller files, as the image is then stored internally in JPEG format, instead of a bitmap). You can also paste an image that is on the clipboard (this should not be used for JPEG images, as you would then store the bitmap). One has to be a bit careful with this, as Insert bitmap does accept JPG files.

Images are stored efficiently in PDF format. It is reasonable to create PDF presentations with lots of JPEG photographs in Ipe. Saving in Postscript is not efficient, as Ipe generates clean 7-bit Postscript files. Also, multiple copies of the same image are embedded only once in PDF documents, but are embedded once for each occurrence in Postscript output.