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  A very short explanation how to make a good figure for your article

1. Vector and bitmap graphics. Resolution
There are two basic formats of graphic files: vector graphics and bitmap. In the vector representation a figure is formed by graphic objects (lines, elipses, Bezier curves, shades of colours etc) allowing arbitrary scaling and being resolution-independent. Bitmaps are just arrays of figure pixels. An important feature of a bitmap figure is resolution usually indicated in dots per inch (dpi). Bitmaps intended for print should be have resolution not less than 300 dpi (600 dpi is a better choice for black and white images) for their original sizes. The resolution of a bitmap image is related with scaling (the 3 in x 3 in 100 dpi)image is equivalent to the 1 in x 1 in 300 dpi one). some graphic utilities (PhotoShop, PhotoPaint) can increase resolution preserving original size of the image (say 72 dpi > 300 dpi). This operation DOES NOT IMPROVE quality of the picture (but increase its volume!) and should not be performed.

The most known file formats for vector graphics are platform-independent (Encapsulated) PostScript (EPS) and MSWindows-oriented (Enhaced) Windows MetaFile (EMF, WMF). There is a plenty of bitmap image formats. A good choice is Tagged Image Format (TIF) or CompuServe format (GIF) for black and white images and GIF or JPG (JPEG) formats for colour/grayscale images, since these formats compress image data (but one should remember about the competition between size and quality of JPG image).

2. Choice of an appropriate image format
Computer-generated images
This category includes charts, schemes, plats, diagrams etc. The best choice for such a type of figures is vector format. A range of software products (e.g. Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator, Mayura Draw (Page Draw), Gnu Plot) can save image directly in the EPS format ("File >> Save as"). Other softwares (Origin, Exel etc) can "print" EPS figures only through system PS Printers (one should choose the appropriate printer and check the field "Print to file"). Best PS Printer drivers are available at Adobe website for free. IMPORTANT NOTE: one have to switch the printer option "PostScript" to "Encapsulated PostScript" before printing figures.

If you work with MSWindows applications and all your attempts to make the EPS figure fail, try to save it as Windows MetaFile (EMF or WMF).

Scanned images and photographs
These images can be represented in any of the mentioned above bitmaps formats (TIF, GIF, JPG). All bitmaps should have appropriate quality and resolution (see Section 1). Please avoid bitmaps-generating quality programs like MS Paint for constructions yuor charts, schemes etc!

How to view/print EPS/bitmap figures
The best software fir viewing/printing PostScript (and PDF) documents is GSView (available for free at http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/). Commercial products Adobe PhotoShop and Corel PhotoPaint are well-known bitmap editors. An exellent freeware bitmap viewer XNView is available at http://www.xnview.com/.

3. How to insert figures into the article
Beginners often have troubles with the incorporation of figures into the LaTeX documents, so it is fully acceptable to send figure separately. In this case authors should include figure captions into the article and give the graphic files unambiguous names (e.g. fig1.eps, fig2a.eps, fig2b.eps, fig3.eps etc).

There are two well-known packets (GRAPHICS/GRAPHICX for LaTeX 2e and EPSF for LaTeX 2.09) allowing one to include EPS figures into the LaTeX document. A simple example of the GRAPHICX usage looks like:

\documentclass[12pt,twoside]{article}
\usepackage{cmpj}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
....................
\begin{figure}
\centerline{\includegraphics{fig1.eps}}
\caption{This is the first figure}
\label{myfig1}
\end{figure}
....................
\end{document}

4. How to send figures by E-mail
We are happy to receive your articles as a single archive file containing the article itself in the LaTeX format, all figures, the LaTeX style-files used in the article etc. Such an archive file can be made using well-known compression utilities: PKZip, ARJ (MS DOS), WinZip, RAR (MSWindows) or TAR and GZIP (Unix).

Size of the article file should not exceed 1 MB (big files sometimes cause big problems for E-mail). Compression utilities usually can "slice" your archive onto pieces with the given size (1MB) in the case of very large files. Alternatively, authors can manually pack their files in several archives less than 1MB each. Finally, the archives should be attached to the accompanying letter and sent to CMP Editorial Borad. Each letter should be have only one attachement, so each piece of a big archive should be attached to a separate letter (with subject like "John Doc. Part 1", "John Doc. Part 2" etc). If authors E-mail client does not support attachements, the archive should be UNEncoded and placed in the body of the letter.

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