The cartoons are stored in uncompressed TIFF type 1 file format which is read by most applications that access TIFF files (DOS extension .TIF). There are 2 sizes of files for each Cartoon. The cartoons are stored in 2 directories, medres containing all the low resolution images while highres contain the high resolution images. A medium resolution image is typically about 1200 pixels wide and so at 300dpi prints perfectly 4" across. A high resolution image is typically 2500 to 3000 pixels wide and are ideal for professional quality printing. Many software packages are available to scale the resolution to any particular size you need.
File sizes for the low/medium resolution (medres) files typically lie between 80Kb and 120Kb while the high resolution (highres) files are between 400Kb and 700Kb, although some may be even larger depending on how complex the image is!. So they can take a long time to load and can be slow to print. And some software can't handle the highres images at all or a lot of the medres images in one go. If you have limited memory you may also experience difficulties in loading highres images or many medres images in one document.
TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format and was jointly developed by Aldus (now Adobe) and Microsoft. There are however, many variants of TIFF including compressed (LZW, Packbits etc.) as well as multi-page or tiled TIFFs. These are much less well supported which is why we don't use these formats.
If after this you still have any support problems then please email our technical support group.
