Peanuts by Charles Schulz for March 02, 2011

Never looked like what they said would make a difference… Charlie’s expression is constant throughout.

He didn’t really hear them with all the pain.

Which pain is worse, Charlie Brown, the one in your arm or Lucy?

It’s your call Charlie Brown, since your the team leader.

He doesn’t have a baseball team, he has a committee… the only animal (in Robert Heinlein’s memorable words) with twelve stomachs and no brain.

Repeat from yesterday:

Hobbes et al., all you have to do in Internet Exploiter (wink) is go to the right hand corner of the window and click on the enlarge tab. You can enlarge the whole page, including the comic strip, up to 400% if you like, without changing the size of the window itself. A tad clunky compared to some other browsers’ approaches perhaps, but it more than gets the job done.

Good decision, Charlie Brown. If you pitch more, you’ll hurt yourself even more.

Thanks Alain

In my version of Internet Explorer you click on “Page”, “Zoom”, then 150% to be equivalent to the amount of zoom that GoComics uses. Microsoft tries to interpolate the pixels when you zoom, like in Word or PowerPoint, so if you use 150% or 200% and look at the original small strip, it looks fairly smooth with the pixelation smoothed out, but still somewhat fuzzy. You don’t want to use zoom in GoComics first and then use Internet Explorer’s zoom, because then it looks worse, since GoComics does such a poor job of zooming. Regardless, all of these approaches are just band-aids, because nothing looks as good as it did on ComicsDotCom. So I agree that we need to complain to GoComics.

Just have Snoopy kiss Lucy and get rid of her.

The subtle arc of all their hats together is quite calming.

We should start a protest, Hobbes, to push GoComics to improve its default comic size or at least its zoom feature.

It’s a shame that two of the greatest masters of comic art, Schultz and Watterson, are featured here in a format which makes their art hard to appreciate!

Hey, everyone - I’m a GoComics admin and I wanted to let you know that we have a resolution upgrade in the works. It may take a while to implement, but when we do roll it out, you’re going to love it.

Also, if you’re a Peanuts fan, don’t forget to enter our Celebrating Peanuts Giveaway. We’re giving away three copies of the giant “Celebrating Peanuts: 60 Years” hardcover. All you have to do to enter is send in a piece of Peanuts fan art. Details here:

http://blogs.gocomics.com/2011/02/celebrating-peanuts-on-gocomics.html

Yo, GeneralMod! Thanks for acknowledging our concerns. It’s nice to know we aren’t just empty voices in the comic void. Much appreciated! :D

Just rub some dirt on it!

Thanks, gocomics! Now I get twice as much Peanuts, here and in the local paper, since so far they are different story lines! Luvvit!!

@GeneralMod, that is great news! There are many strips I’m interested in on GoComics, but the reading experience has been so terrible that I couldn’t stand to read them here. La Cucaracha and Peanuts brought me over (especially Peanuts), but it’s still been painful. I’m looking forward to the upgrade.

Little girls have all ways been willing to have boys work through their tears…prepairs them to be wives and mothers.

I have no complaints about my experiences here. Maybe you guys are just too picky.

GeneralMod, could you also fix the problem with uploading avatars while you’re at it? Hate to sound like the Critical Parent eternally harping on one string (pun unintentional, believe it or not), but I’m not the most patient of dudes when it comes to technical fixes.

Quality of magnification was never an issue with me. I’m farsighted at reading, need less illumination at night than most people I know and can see the stars in color.

He needs Tommy John surgery already?!?

Thanks GeneralMod

One major reason that we want better resolution is that we enjoy looking at the details of the artwork, which are too difficult to see when the strip is tiny.

Also, Peanuts daily strips are a worst case on GoComics, because the ratio of height to width is about the smallest of any strip. So the characters and text in the originals are tiny.

Please note that all of the Peanuts strips on GoComics, both daily and Sunday, contain major JPEG artifacts because the files are so highly compressed. These show up as dirty areas in the white space, especially near dark lines and edges of objects. You need source files that do not contain these compression artifacts.

So there are two issues that you need to address: resolution and compression. You need higher pixel counts for the zoomed strips so that they do not show pixilation and do not look fuzzy. But you also need to avoid using highly compressed source files that contain dirty JPEG-type artifacts.

For resolution, one good test with Peanuts is whether the small copyright information in the daily strips appears sharp and easily readable when the strips are zoomed. That’s how it was on ComicsDotCom.

The strips on GoComics display as 600 pixels wide before they are zoomed, but on ComicsDotCom they are 640 pixels wide. This doesn’t sound like a lot of difference, but it makes a big difference in area, and a small strip like a Peanuts daily looks a whole lot better at 640 pixels wide. Would it be possible for GoComics to display everything with a width of 640 pixels?

Also, we Peanuts fans would prefer to see the Sunday strips in the original horizontal format, rather than in the vertical format with the second panel omitted, the way it was displayed last Sunday, February 27th. Of course, right now the vertical format has better resolution when zoomed because it is bigger to begin with. But after GoComics fixes the resolution problem, we would really prefer to see Peanuts Sunday strips in the original horizontal format.

Thanks a lot for your help.

Must they be compressed now? After all, they weren’t like this originally.

I blame The Los Angeles Times.

:-)

There are different types of data files for storing images (comic strips). Low-quality JPEGs (JPG) use a lot of compression and create a lot of artifacts (dirt) in the strips. Once a strip is compressed like this, a lot of data is lost and you can never get the original back, with any amount of processing. But the file size is very small and takes very little storage space.

Some file types, like high-quality JPEGs, use less compression and have very few artifacts, but the file size is larger.

Even better, some types, like PNG, use compression but it is “lossless.” This means that you can get back the full original quality, but the file size is even larger.

Then there are types like BMP which use no compression at all and show the original quality. But these have the largest file size.

We need GoComics to use lossless compression or no compression at all, so that we can see the original quality of the strips without artifacts.

We also need GoComics to use original source files that are at least 900-1000 pixels wide, so that pixelation isn’t noticeable when zooming the comic strips. They can then use reduction to create the smaller ones that are 640 pixels wide.

look at the difference in panels. comic are shrinking so fast. used to be four panels. now its three.

by 2020 all the comics will be one panel

Original publish date March 4, 1964.