Pixel Preview

The Pixel Preview feature lets you preview your artwork to see how it will look after you export it as a bitmapped image. When the Pixel Preview display mode is on, vector strokes and fills are rasterized (turned into a bitmapped image) for onscreen viewing. Therefore, when you zoom in on a path, the edges will appear bitmapped (pixelated). You can also assign a compression setting to the Pixel Preview to simulate JPEG or GIF artifacts onscreen without using an external browser application.

To select Pixel Preview:

  1. On the View menu, click Pixel Preview. Expression Design displays the Pixel Preview dialog box.

  1. Select a Width, Height, and Resolution to simulate. For example, images for the Web typically are set to 72 dpi or 96 dpi. If you change the Width and Height fields (which are linked together), the result will appear as though you scaled your artwork, even though your original objects have not changed.
  2. Choose the File Format that you want to simulate: GIF, JPEG, BMP, TIFF, PNG, Windows Media Photo, or PSD.
  3. Choose a compression quality or color palette setting. For example, if you choose GIF, you can choose 256-color Web palette, 128-color Adaptive, 64-color Adaptive, and so on. For JPEG, you can choose a compression setting (the lower the quality, the more compression and the smaller the final file size).
  4. Click OK.

Changing Pixel Preview settings

If you want to view your document with different Pixel Preview settings, click Change Pixel Preview Settings on the View menu. The Pixel Preview dialog box appears again. Choose the new settings, and then click OK.

You can turn off the Pixel Preview display mode by clicking Pixel Preview on the View menu again.

The original image (top left) and zoomed in to 3x (bottom left); Pixel Preview set to GIF with 16 colors (middle) and JPEG level 5 compression (right)